


Sync

by 35grams, Elivra



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Abduction, Bounty Hunter, Corporate Espionage, Enemies to Lovers, Far Future, Intimacy, M/M, Sex, diplomat, neural enhancements, one bed, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2020-10-26 09:23:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20739941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/35grams/pseuds/35grams, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elivra/pseuds/Elivra
Summary: A bounty hunter infiltrates the most secure station in the known galaxy and captures a diplomat with blue in his eye.Elivra: Levi35grams: Erwin





	1. Chapter 1

The tinny, everlasting whine in Erwin's ears warbled and skipped with each shudder of what sounded like a ship's battered hull. As he stirred and opened his eyes, he moved to his temple to switch on his internal HUD and recalibrate his hearing aid, but he could only strain against binds lashing him to a co-pilot's seat. 

He recognized it so as the pilot themself performed maneuvers next to him that would have emptied his stomach were the ship not equipped with half-decent geostabilizers. Small mercy.

The whine in his head became a screech as another shudder jostled the black box in his head. Someone must have unsealed the plate from the implant console behind his ear and simply left it open and vulnerable to physical shock. His eyes squeezed shut at the sound before he chanced a look at his prime suspect, but his kidnapper had used his own tech to render every atom of his features a perfectly inscrutable black. 

Erwin clawed for his last memories as he came to. The gala. He'd never left his drink alone. He'd left for his room with a village of security detail. His black box had been rigged to recognize every wanted face from every known galactic sector, every outline of every conceivable weapon. This should not have happened. It should not be happening.

To think Earth's diplomatic corps threw so much time and capital at preventing sabotage by shapeless beings of light and energy, by photosynthesizing telepaths, by electromagnetivores and hematophagic nebula harvesters, but not, apparently, by this little humanoid shadow who, judging by the lack of laserfire in the last few minutes, had just successfully slipped through The Capitol's defenses. They veered into deep, empty space and switched the ship to autopilot.

Erwin Smith, one of United Earth's top diplomats on the assignment of the century, turned to his captor.

"If you don't like neural circuits and grey matter all over your pristine dashboard," Erwin said through the persistent whine, "I'd appreciate if you reinstalled my shock absorber."

  
  


***

_ There is nothing new under the sun. _

He could remember the exact moment he'd first heard that damned phrase. It was one of his few memories from his early childhood, a tender moment that had quickly devolved into confused tears on his part and exhausted exasperation on his mother's: all simply because he had insisted on knowing  _ which _ sun and  _ why _ was he not new if he was not old?

Well. He had now lived long enough to know what she had meant, and that it was often true. One of the Capitol’s defensive beams streaked past his trusty scrap-heap of a ship, and with a single flick of the controls that was practically muscle memory at this point, Levi managed to avoid yet another blinding fusillade sent his way. He almost laughed out loud; it looked like the chucklefucks in the Capitol’s Defense Sector still had their heads up their bionic assholes, too hyperfixated on the notion of “cutting-edge” and “state-of-the-art” to actually bother about implementing a sturdy security system. They had the latest in EMP micromissiles that could penetrate “any protective shield used by current intergalactic vessels”, but Levi’s ship had a simple magnetized net back from its scrapping days, back when they still made nets of 5 microns or less. And that took care of the EMP swarm.

It was in the last leg of his escape route that Levi noticed the Mark stir in his peripheral vision. It didn't bother him; though he preferred to keep the co-pilot's seat empty, this was not the first time he had to pick up the entire package rather than the required intel. A couple of swerves in his piloting confirmed that the man was properly secured in his seat - it wouldn't do to damage the goods.

One final obstacle lay in his path, a wide, buzzing force-field that had deployed the minute he had taken off from the docks. A small hexagon of heavily guarded clear space remained to service the perpetually heavy traffic of the Capitol. He could physically hear the newly-upgraded security squads closing in behind him, trying to corner him.

Levi smirked. The Mark groaned beside him.

He found what he needed easily enough: a heavy, sluggish luxury yacht. He waited for exactly 1.25 seconds before deploying his last, best trick: a gravity beam, the good old-fashioned kind strong enough to haul asteroids. He fired his thrusters, swung his ship in the exact angle flashing in his HUD, and catapulted himself into the line of vessels exiting the Capitol, slipping in right before a rusty shuttle and zipping out.

He'd done it. Again.

_ There's nothing new in the whole damn universe, kid. _

His exhilaration was short-lived. As he switched into autopilot, a familiar voice next to him rumbled something about grey matter and his dashboard. 

Levi paused, frowning at his shining dashboard. Damn right it was pristine.

Listening to the man felt like going against his every principle, but Levi was nothing if not fair, and the Mark had a point. The goods would be worthless if damaged beyond recovery.

Not bothering to hide his scowl, since his censor hid it for him, Levi strode to his work bag, where he had unceremoniously thrown in the plate before deciding to leave the finer data acquisition to the experts and dragging the whole man with him.

The Mark was looking at him - no, staring at him, as if his gaze could pierce through his shield with sheer force of will. Biting back a snort, Levi stepped to his side and snapped his head back against the headrest. The Mark opened his mouth to say something, but Levi was having none of it: he moved his head to the side where the inside of the Mark's central console gaped open above his ear. Levi saw gold-titanium alloy circuits within and scowled again.

_ Rich bastard. _

He set the cushioned shock absorber in place with little ceremony, and reached inside to connect the external synapses that held the screws shut-

And lightning struck him.

  
  


***  
  
  


The ringing stopped. For just a moment, that everlasting miasma of noise hovering in his head from his first quiet memories in the mountains to sterile examination rooms to special accommodations for university exams and to his first nervous, noisy breaths in space was gone. Every little sound in this cobbled-together craft poured through his body. The engine purred in his ribcage. The aches and groans of the hull plucked at his spine. The myriad blips and chirps of the navigational array swept, featherlike, over his skin. His eyes stung. It was incredible. It was too much.

He mumbled thoughtlessly. "What did you-"

As quickly as it left, the crackling returned, and drowned the first wonderful sounds he’d ever heard. 

He looked up at his captor, knowing he must look as desperate for answers as he felt, but held his tongue. Though Erwin could not see past his full-body censor, anyone could read the coiled tension in his stance. He chanced a guess from his scandalized silhouette and sharp gasp that he hadn't bothered with proper apparel before diving into his circuits. Why, when he must have so confidently rooted around in Erwin's head before giving it up and hauling him aboard. 

A person could sooner learn how to pilot every class of freighter used in the Sol system with grainy datanet tutorials before knowing how to open a civilian's head without killing them, let alone digging into a diplomat's on an assignment so sensitive that even Erwin knew nothing of what they uploaded and linked to his kill switch, rigged to render him comatose and the intel next to useless should anyone get too close to the data. 

That he was still alive was less a miracle than a testament to this man's skill. Even if someone else had walked him through his head one wire at a time, no backseat driver nor algorithm had just gotten them out of the most patrolled and heavily fortified area in the known galaxy. Erwin's extraction. The censor. What looked like a custom built, unlicensed craft. Whatever his black trade, he was a veteran of it. 

And yet, though Erwin caught a good glimpse at a sharp, ornery, human face when the spark momentarily shorted that censor, the current-as-of-yesterday database cross-referencing with his retinal snapshot wasn't yielding a single match. 

He appreciated a challenge.

“Are you alright?” Erwin asked.

  
  
  


***

  
  


Levi jumped back with a hiss. 

He could  _ see _ . 

Not that he couldn’t before, but for a split second, his ever-glitching, third-rate artificial eyes could pass for the newest model. He could tell, from the blaring teal of his seats. He could tell, from the heightened glimmer beyond his windshield. He stared, shocked, into the Mark’s equally startled eyes.

_ So this is blue _ , he thought faintly. Never had he seen anything like it. He could only remember with his old child’s eyes an old glossy print his mother had shown him, of what she called an original Earth lake. The image in his memory was dulled, not by glitching tech, but by time. It was the closest example he could think of, to even process, what the Mark’s eyes looked like.

He had never seen anything like it.

And then it was gone again, like a translucent screen had shuttered down before Levi’s eyes. Sights and shapes and colours were hazy and faded and comfortable once more, the Mark’s eyes were again some pitiful light grey, and Levi almost let out a gasp of relief. And then the Mark spoke, asked  _ him _ if he was alright, and he almost lashed out in response. Was  _ he _ alright? No he fucking was not.

He had seen the small flicker of the man’s pupils, adjusting themselves to focus on something closer, something new. His censor may have faltered at the worst moment, and he needed to have a word with Z. He released the bindings from the copilot’s seat until the Mark was sitting with nothing but handcuffs in place.

“Get up,” Levi said harshly, slipping his old blaster from its holster. He was only slightly appeased that his voice came as a low, electronic drone, and that the man could very well see his weapon. The Mark hesitated for a whole second, his grey eyes flitting from between his blaster to the interior of the ship.

“I said move,” Levi said, his disguised voice turning sharper with the threat.

The Mark moved. He stood up slowly, then looked around as if to wonder where to go. Levi knew that look, and wasn’t fooled by it. He jabbed the business end of his blaster harshly at the man’s back.

“That way. Don’t try anything stupid.”

_ No _ , Levi thought as they marched down the bridge and to the holding cell in silence. This man was emphatically  _ not  _ stupid.

He triple-checked the locks on the cell before returning to the bridge, and sent out a quick, encrypted message that the package was acquired and the data would soon be delivered. Then he switched on his comms, cleared all the security levels to access the channel that he and only one other person used.

“Hey.”

A sharp gasp. “ _ Levi! _ Gods, you almost gave me a heart attack! Is it done? How did it it go-”

Levi pinched the bridge of his nose. “I had to bring him along.”

“Oh?”

“And my stupid tech glitched again.”

“Oh.”

He grit his teeth. “ _ Oh? _ ” He repeated harshly. “Is that all you have to say?”

“Well-”

“My censor fucking broke down, Hange.” He ruffled his hair in frustration. “I think he saw me.”

There was a mechanical groan, then a minute pause. “That’s new.”

Levi snorted.

“No, really, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Even the most basic visual filter isn’t rigged to one’s own visual cortex. That would defeat the point.”

“So what are you saying? I’m breaking down?”

They let out an answering snort. “Don’t sign yourself up for the scrapyards just yet. I need to think about this.” Another pause. “Did your vision glitch too?”

“It-” Levi hesitated. “It was different.”

“Different how?”

“The readings were… different.”

“Explain.”

He huffed. “I don’t know, Hange. It was like...like I saw more.” A flash of lake-blue. “When I usually glitch, I see...less.”

A long beat of silence. “Well,” Hange said finally. “You’d better get here as fast as you can so I can tinker inside both your heads.”

“I hope I get special treatment, being a loyal customer and all.”

Hange cackled loudly. “You bet your ass, Shortstack.”

Levi finally smirked. “See you soon, Four-Eyes.”

He ended the call.


	2. Chapter 2

Erwin ran his shackled hands along the prepared bed, the old fashioned bolted shelves and end table, the rim of one of several small pots holding some unrecognizable, brilliantly crimson flora. Not a cruel hologram, then. Books on shelves. Two pillows. Several dozen unexpired rations sealed in neatly arranged packets in the second drawer and a thermos attached to a water dispenser built into the wall. Erwin waited for his captor to return and take him out of this guest bedroom he'd shown him into by mistake and into a proper cell, and made it one full, silent minute before allowing himself a seat.

It was becoming progressively more difficult to chart a course around this man. Brutes can be fooled. Mercenaries can be paid. Ideologues can be coddled. His captor pretends to be the first with a gun he never intended to fire and a small kindness he didn't bother to refuse. He uses all the tools of the second, yet takes him into a palace of a cell. He is not the third, or else he would have delivered his sermon as soon as Erwin opened his eyes. 

And his ship. His wonderland of a ship. In the short distance from the bridge, through the hallways, and to this room below, Erwin glimpsed everything from weapon racks to terrariums to tapestries to tomes and hardware belonging to what could be every space-faring species from here to the Port. Erwin straightened.

The Port is second only to the Capitol in size yet dwarfs its population by several orders of magnitude. It moves artlessly from one system to another while the Capitol hovers precisely in place. What the Capitol calls laws are there only idle suggestions. Erwin rose to thumb through the books on the shelves. Every sentient species and every one of its cultural and national permutations can be found buying, selling, scrounging, killing, preaching and breathing on that labyrinthine station. It's the perfect place to lose yourself. To buy anything. Sell anyone.

The books were stacked high and tight and covered everything from engine maintenance to flora cultivation and belonged to at least three separate sentient species. Some crackled as he opened them, as if he'd been the first to part their pages in years, or ever. Others were faded to illegibility and crumbled in his hands. There was no order to them, no reason. They could be spoils, gifts, rewards, curiosities. They could have been planted here to distract him. They could have simply been forgotten. 

No, this was not enough. No sane man enters a negotiation with little but guesswork and conjecture. And it must be a negotiation, not a fight. Erwin would rather take his chances at the Port than even consider flying this death trap single-handedly. He had other talents. 

Erwin crouched by the door and examined the locks. A third edition Silverton, a revolving Malt & co., and some brittle 22th century thing that probably came stock with with the ship. Not enough spare power to route to more advanced electronic locks, and walls too light and thin to support the industrial variety. He was almost disappointed.

He shorts the first two, picks the third, leaves the door open a crack to get some air into the room, and takes to the bed to return to the collection of unpublished late 8th dynasty epic poetry from the Esthesin system to sate the comparative interstellar linguistics doctorate gnawing a hole through his skull with glee.

  
  


***  
  


Levi plotted the course and set the ETA to flash permanently in a corner of his internal, retinal-projected HUD. He inhaled his carefully rationed food pack. Veal, this time. He ran diagnostics - he already knew his ship was practically undamaged from his mission, but even a single loose bolt now could spell disaster later. As the check ran on the dashboard console, Levi moved to his small pantry, disposed of the remains of his rations, and set about making his tea.

He'd heard somewhere that the tea from original Earth was lost forever, buried under history and dust plains alike. The fancy people called this a  _ tisane _ , and while Levi had always been the first to reject needless luxury, tea was the only exception.

_ Centuries ago, you'd have been called bourgeois,  _ echoed the memory of Farlan's disdainful voice.

Luckily, the low beeping signalling the end of his diagnostic check distracted him. The ship was fine, though a panel near the rear thrusters was singed, its anti-pyretic coating almost gone.

Levi gulped down his tea, cleaned up, and went to grab the spray and the suit, despite exhaustion creeping up on him. It could wait until tomorrow, but he must be diligent.

_ You mean anal _ , Isabel's voice rattled in his head.

He shrugged off the memory with a low growl, and set about his work.

He didn't know when sleep had caught him, but when he woke up in his pilot's seat on the bridge, his HUD told him that he'd been gone for almost five hours. Damn. He must have been exhausted. His gaze shot to the security cams - the Mark appeared to be reading in bed, as he had been before. Levi freshened himself up with a sigh and reluctantly made his way to the cell. 

He would've preferred not interacting with the man at all, but while the cell held a stock of rations, it had no means to rehydrate them. Levi stiffened, preparing for the upcoming conversation. Then, he stopped entirely.

The door was open. Not just unlocked.  _ Open.  _ Levi had triple-checked the triple locks, and here the door stood, slightly ajar, as if the man was politely claiming some amount of privacy while still welcoming visits.

The  _ nerve _ .

Levi slammed it open with no satisfaction at the way he’d startled the Mark from his book.

“What the fuck do you think you're doing?”  
  
  


***  
  


Erwin spoke over his thudding heart as he looked for the page he'd lost in his jump. He couldn’t lip read with the damned censor, but he could take an educated guess.

"It was a little stuffy in here. I had no way of letting you know," he said, motioning at the disconnected comm panel near the door. He tried his best to appear perfectly bored as his captor unwittingly showed him with this little outburst everything he needed to know.

  
  


***  
  


Levi felt like he must have steam coming out of his ears like his bloody teakettle. It took everything he had to keep from decking the man then and there.

“Apologies my ship isn't up to your golden standards,  _ My Lord _ ,” Levi growled, stepping inside. “Maybe another helping of sedative would change your mind? Or maybe that shock absorber is making you  _ dull _ .” He loomed threateningly over the bed, watching the man’s face for every hint of an expression. “I should remove it again. Just in case.”  
  


***  
  


Erwin obstinately kept the book raised in front of his face as he hurried to decipher the bits and pieces he could barely hear over the static whine when the man stalked with no small menace to his side. His eyes roved over the blackened silhouette. It was different. He must have changed into something more comfortable than the form-fitting flight suit he’d worn before. Sleeves rolled up over corded forearms. Trousers loose enough, and boots large enough, to hide a battalion's cache of firearms if he wished. 

And here lay Erwin with his tie undone and his jacket and shoes tossed aside and not a thing to his defense but his teeth and his dull, rounded nails. But the man wouldn't touch him, not for something so petty. His threats were uncoordinated, but his indignation real. So this was, in fact, his own ship, and he cared deeply for it. 

"On the contrary," Erwin said, no need to raise his voice above a conspiratorial hush now that his listener elected to stand so near, "I've never seen a more fascinating craft."

  
  


***

_ A smooth talker _ , he’d read. Cunning. Forceful. Lethally intelligent. Levi remembered the gist of what he’d learned about Erwin Smith, Senior Diplomat, before beginning his mission. One note had stood out.

_ Can charm the skin off a Thessianite. _

He thought of the actual Thessianite pelt hanging outside the doorway to the bridge - a gift from a satisfied client - and wondered if it wasn’t just a turn of phrase. It seemed entirely possible as he stared at the man’s blue-grey eyes, at the honey rumble of his tone, at the way his entire golden, silk-encased frame overfilled the bed even starfish-sleeper Hange had called roomy. Even lying down, his hands shackled, holding a book of fucking Esthesian nursery rhymes, of all things - even now, he had the upper hand. As if he was a valued guest. As if Levi’s censor didn’t exist. As if Levi’s threats meant nothing.

Levi did not like this feeling.

“Get up,” he snapped. “It’s meal time.”

  
  


***  
  


Erwin hid his satisfaction as he ate his gruel at a spotless counter in the ship's kitchen. The man stood sentinel behind him until he finished. Erwin hid it also in the myriad questions he lobbed at him about all the scrolls and icons and textiles and statuettes they passed, yet though he meant every one, his captor didn't speak again.

The man recalibrated the electronic locks and installed a few good, old fashioned padlocks. The sizzle and thuds of his labor went on for the better part of an hour before he went on his way. Erwin waited a respectable few hours before shorting the electronics using a spool of wire the captain had missed in his numerous confiscations and, with a running start, slamming through the still-cooling padlock hooks.

He shed the constricting top layers of his ceremonial outfit down to a white undershirt and rubbed at his aching shoulder. A distorted whine warbled in his ear as he returned to the bed with another book. A shame that all that effort had gone to waste. He ought to compensate the man for his trouble.

***  
  


Levi startled awake to a grainy visual feed and glitching peripherals.  _ Not this shit again _ . He closed his eyes while he did his daily seated calisthenics, using his HUD to shut down and reboot his autozoom feature with a special subroutine Hange had installed for him. It didn’t have much of a success rate, unlike the rest of him put together, but it was something; even this temporary fix for the lifelong glitch had taken him years to find.

He only opened his eyes when he was done flexing his toes the appropriate number of times to stave off spaceborne muscle atrophy, and the first thing he focused on was, naturally, the Mark.

Levi saw red. Literally. His HUD began to flash with the information he could see well enough on the security cam feed - Erwin fucking Smith had fucked with the locks. Again.

Since his glitching visual cortex was not essential for recaps, his memory instantly supplied him with several images of increasing aggravation - the man’s incessant chatter and questions about his ship, his polite smile as he looked up at him from the cell’s bed, the colour of his eyes (not light blue-grey,  _ lake blue _ ) - and Levi stood up with an abrupt crash that would surely have woken his prisoner up.

Enough.

He didn’t care about the noise, it wouldn’t matter anymore, because he was just about done with Erwin Smith and his lies and his eyes and his fucking mind games. Levi loaded a syringe and headed to the cell. There was no reason for the man to stay awake for the entire journey.

He barged into the cell with no explanation, certain the giant needle in his hand would do the explaining for him. He felt calm and collected, the eye of his own hurricane where all that existed was rage and peace in synchronicity, the perfect duality to be on a mission.

He had to remind himself he wasn’t killing the Mark. Rose wouldn’t like that.

The man was indeed awake and alert, his mouth opening in alarm to voice what would surely be a compelling argument. Levi wouldn’t let him. He raised the syringe and leaned over to grab Erwin Smith’s arm when the lights began to flash, and the same message began to drone repeatedly in every hallway of the ship.

_ ‘Warning. Unknown vessel approaching.’ _  
  


***  
  
  


Erwin's arm smarted in his captor's iron grip as they shared a glance about as well as a man could with a shadow. The captain wasn't expecting a visitor. 

Erwin was yanked toward the bridge. Once there, the man cuffed him out of sight of the bridge camera and switched to a manual mic, presumably in case Erwin decided to sing as soon as the two captains' conversation began. 

The bridge displayed a perfect marbled sphere of a ship. One hundred of theirs could fit inside it. This particular grey on white marbling was styled after the contours of the Kos peoples' third largest city. If they had received word of the abduction and suspected this ship, it would have already been towed into their cargo bay at gunpoint. This must be something else.

He strained, but that cursed static swallowed all but every third word. 

His captain was nearly through his rushed greeting and cavalier disengagement before Erwin realized why the Kos would have bothered to stop this gadfly of a ship.

The moment the captain began to turn his ship, the Kos immobilized them with a gravitational lock. The dashboard registered heat signatures from a rapidly powering laser bank. The captain swore. His hands flew over the controls.

***

  
  


Fucking  _ Kos _ .

Levi always tried to avoid them if he could. Their planet was pretty and bountiful, but its caretakers were pompous, overbearing, and easily offended. And going by the spitting trills of the Kossian captain once he’d reestablished their connection, these guys were  _ very  _ offended.

***

  
  


"They have detected plants or creatures aboard that aren't native to Kos, captain," Erwin said.

  
  


***

  
  


Levi whipped around to look at his prisoner, who sat meekly where he had left him, cuffed hands resting on his lap, yet eyes sharp and calculating.

“What?” Levi grit out reluctantly. “What’s that got to do with anything?

***

Erwin interpreted the captain’s words with some help from his bemused gestures.

"Kos swamplands are dying. Invasive foreign bacteria. The empire announced at our last summit that it was almost perfectly suited to destroy their largest biome. They suspect planet-scale sabotage. So, planet-wide quarantine."

He raced ahead of his captor’s knowing frown. "In public, you've heard it called a breakdown of diplomatic ties. Why not? Locked airspace. No one allowed in or out. But it's the opposite. Capitol members agreed to engineer this facade together to let the Kos save face while they try to contain the outbreaks, and while they hunt their saboteurs."

The captain must think nothing of cutting through restricted airspace. This ship flew no colors, possessed no identifiable registration. The captain could slip this mote of dust past warring dreadnoughts and empire-class starships blindfolded given his performance at the Capitol. This was just good, old-fashioned bad luck

"Captain, I recommend we try to look less suspicious than we already are, and destroy your stock."

***  
  


Levi sorely wanted to tell the man to shove his recommendation up his ass but damn him, he made sense. 

If environmental sabotage really was the case, then Levi was in deep shit. He had a little nursery pod tucked into the back of the ship filled with sprigs of herbs from his years of travel. Most of them he used to make his tisanes, he had a rare specimen of flowering zafron that gave a lovely flavour to his meals, ficcus roots that helped with his sudden bursts of migraine, and Isabel’s pet succulent that he hadn’t dared throw away. Compared to some other items on his ship, his plants were the picture of innocence. Usually. Unless you were near fucking Kos in a planetwide state of ecological breakdown.

The Mark watched him, waiting. Levi pictured the warm little pod, the smile on Isabel’s face when she watered the thing she had inexplicably named Tony Hawk.

“No one touches my plants,” Levi said shortly and turned back to the comm unit, ignoring the slight dip of the man’s head.

“Look, I’m not planning to land anywhere near your planet,” Levi seethed into the mic, keeping his voice level with effort.

“You have crossed into quarantined air space,” the Kossian said, and his lofty voice, even via universal translator, made Levi want to punch him in the gills. “Your botanical stock  _ will _ be destroyed.”

“I’m in a fu- I’m in an airlocked,  _ sealed  _ spaceship and my destination is in a whole other sector,” Levi countered. “The stock is in a vacuum-sealed, temperature-controlled pod.” He swallowed down his burgeoning anger. “There is no way, accidental, or otherwise, for even a trace of them to magically enter your atmosphere from here.”

There was a pause, and Levi almost thought he’d convinced them, when the Kossian responded, his words clipped. “Preparing to board. This will be over quickly.”

No way. No fucking way could they board Levi’s ship. He glanced over his shoulder at the Mark.

_ Fuck _ . He couldn’t let them see him. His ship would be suspicious enough, untagged and harbouring contraband from every corner of the galaxy, but a captive Capitol diplomat would be the end of him. A sensor linked to the console began to beep to herald the unwelcome visitors. Levi glanced at the hulking silver giant outside his windshield, his mind in overdrive. A third gen Model D Kossian carrier, one where the auxiliary engine feed defect was not yet fixed. That would take care of the gravitational lock, and then...

Sweat beaded at his temples. And then...

***  
  


<<If you could allow me access to your ship's Holotailor>> Erwin began in the Kos common tongue, <<we might move on in time for lunch>>

The captain turned slowly as his translator worked in his ear.

<<Make your choice>> Erwin said, now in the Kos business dialect. He knew the captain's translator would make a note of the change. Warnings began to blare from the dashboard. <<You have about ten seconds to set the program and introduce me as a representative of the Kossian interstellar merchant's guild>>

In nine seconds, Erwin, unshackled and looking the part of a seven-foot amphibious upright hexapod, was introduced to the Kos captain as a representative of the Kossian interstellar merchant's guild. A flurry of compliments, a self deprecation at his own clunky tongue after trading for so long among the other space-faring peoples, and a perfectly proportioned bit of regional small talk softened up the old captain, but the man's hind legs continued to bear down, his spine remained stiff, and his skin flared between pebbled blues and smooth teals as his mood shifted between boredom and annoyance. They were in luck. Erwin and his captor were not the only ones who wanted this long over with. 

Erwin cobbled together a flimsy excuse for their trespass and the urgent need for them to move on undisturbed. The details wouldn't matter soon. Before the Kos captain could respond, Erwin spoke again.

<<May the hundredth son never part from white sands>>

The Kos captain did not speak, but his three golden eyes flickered here and there as someone spoke in his ear. When his unseen contact concluded their interruption, the Kos spoke once more.

<<May the sands never darken...>> the Kos started.

<<....and the son never burn>> Erwin finished. 

In thirty seconds, the Kos ship was a mote of dust in the rivers of interstellar starlight. Erwin removed the fitted hologram with a few flicks of his tracked pupils as the captain mutely restored the ship's autopilot and revoked Erwin's access to the very same holotech that he still hid behind.

"They now believe that I am an elite undercover operative gathering intelligence on a prime suspect after having contracted you and this ship so that I may travel undetected," Erwin said. "Maybe give this system a wide berth for a few months."

He sat in the nearest ops chair with less grace than he intended. His ears rang. His hands shook. Had he not remembered paying his spies handsomely for this little detail, had he forgotten a single turn of phrase, had he not been able to read that expressive mouth and twin set of mandibles - he decided not to wonder. The captain had made his choice, and so did he. 

He will see with his own eyes who had paid this man to abduct him.

"Lunch?"

  
  


***

Levi's every instinct had screamed against listening to him. He didn't know why he did it. He would never be able to explain why he had trusted him. He was supposed to be his hostage, his ticket home. But he had listened to him.

And Smith had  _ delivered. _ The Kossian speech flowed from his tongue, accent and all, like he had grown up speaking it. He had used the right tone of sheepish and confident, just the right amount of deferential words. He had adapted his conversation to the Kossian’s changing reactions. And not a word of being held captive.

The man sank into a seat, seemingly overwhelmed, and Levi simply turned away and strode to the kitchen, his mind a confused mess of  _ why _ . It was only there that he realized that he still held his blaster in his clenched fist, still primed. 

Levi holstered it and leaned on the counter with a shuddering breath. This could have gone wrong in so many ways. He had been ready to massacre dozens of Kossians. He had been prepared to incapacitate the ship. He knew its innards, he could have done it. He would have done it.

And then Erwin Smith had made all of it unnecessary.

His mind churned as he rehydrated the food. That obviously coded phrase had been their salvation, but it could just as likely have been a clandestine call for help, some sophisticated instructions to let them go only to track them, catch up with them later. Maybe he’s thinking too much. Maybe he’s not thinking enough. 

Ever since Smith had woken up in his copilot's seat, Levi had started to feel like the floor beneath him had disappeared. He had so many, many questions, and he needed answers.

He looked at his open palms, at the tell-tale haze on the edges that only he could see. He could ask his questions, but from the little he had observed of the man, he doubted Smith would give him any more than he already had, not unless Levi lessened the distance he had deliberately kept between them. 

_ Fine _ . He’ll play along.

He removed the censor and delivered their trays. Smith hadn't moved, his hands folded as if waiting to be cuffed again. His eyes went wide, openly staring at Levi, now that he could.

Levi handed him the tray. “Lunch.” Then he sat down in his own seat, and got right to it. “Why did you do that?”

  
  


***

Erwin hadn't imagined this particular reward so suddenly and so soon. The captain handed him his lunch and sat some distance away in the pilot's chair. He faced him as if to force the novelty of his bared face and body to wear off all the faster, but Erwin couldn't imagine looking away anytime soon. He could finally read his lips.

"Why not? I'm witnessing history,” Erwin said. “The first successful Capitol abduction."

The captain wore no emblems or signs or brands, no distinctive clothing, no unusual cut to his hair. Erwin could not imagine a man more suited to slipping in and out of crowds and dogfights and brawls and yet arresting whomever he pleased with his eyes alone. 

"I wouldn't mind meeting whoever knew to hire someone like you."

***

_ Someone like you _ .

Levi let out a humourless snort. The words could mean anything, from a backhanded comment about his occupation, to a jibe about his height, to… something else entirely. Levi let it slide.

That he was forthcoming about his reason was a surprise, but Levi was learning quickly: always expect the unexpected with Erwin Smith. For a man with a career in diplomacy, he seemed to be far too much of a risk taker. He turned away from his fascinated gaze and scooped up some tabbouleh.

“You must have a death wish.”


	3. Chapter 3

  
Erwin bartered for access to nonessential parts of the ship with a list of kill switches designed to corrupt the intel in his head. His death, it went unsaid. The rest were more useful to the captain. No blunt force trauma to the head. No induced sleep lasting more than twelve hours. No more than three instances of sedation, ever. The captain's fork stilled. He leaned back with a frown, as if this whole business was ruining his appetite.

The seemingly invasive practice had solved the issue of how to transport sensitive information with such a sterling rate of success compared to unsecure channels or vulnerable physical cases that Capitol diplomats had begun to transport even low-risk information in this manner. Erwin had about as much say in the process as he would have had in the model of the starship that had transported him to the Capitol station.

The captain took their trays to the wash and recycling stations, leaving Erwin stunned at the scale of his victory. He'd planned to wear him down with a few petty rebellions and eventually force a dialogue, but this run-in with the Kos accelerated his timeline past comfort. He did not yet know him well enough to know when to open his mouth and when to shut it. All the access and attention he wanted, and no sure way to exploit it.

***

‘Risk-taker’ didn’t even  _ begin _ to cover whatever Erwin fucking Smith was. He was talkative, surprisingly so, and if Levi had known switching off his censor would have made him spill so much information so readily, he wouldn’t have put it up in the first place. The inexplicably frequent attention to his mouth was less welcome.

It wasn’t just the censor. Smith had made it clear that he wanted access to more than just the cell, and after some thought, Levi agreed. All the system access points were biolocked to all but Levi, and while Smith could walk up and down the ship and gush about Levi’s collection as much as he wanted, he wouldn’t even be able to, for instance, access the escape pod, let alone use it.

Besides, he had been an invaluable asset in their Kos mishap. Despite the greater crime of lugging him off to his eventual death, Levi did not like the vague feeling of indebtedness the man had induced in him, like a bad itch that refused to go away.

So he put away the handcuffs and let the locks on the cell door remain broken. He had a lot to plan anyway. He’s going home.

***

The run-in necessitated a new, longer course. It was plain from the hours the captain spent running logistics at the navigator's station. How much longer wasn't clear, but even a single-system detour could mean a week to a starship. To a diminutive courier-class like theirs, even longer.

The captain put Erwin to work. Dust this room, water these plants, catalog these stolen - pardon, reclaimed - artifacts. A tactic to keep Erwin from learning how to bypass the ion barriers barring access to the ship's more important stations, he was sure, though he needn't worry. Not every lock could - or should - be picked. 

Despite the sheer volume of pieces aboard the ship, there was an order to and care for them that Erwin could only truly appreciate as he checked wall fastenings, polished protective glass, checked inventory and noted any changes - deleterious or otherwise - to their stock. Running and maintaining a one-man ship was itself a feat. A one-man smuggling operation of this scale and complexity on top of it was otherworldly.

When they made the first of many stops on their route to unload or take up an item or ten, the captain suggested he return to his guest room for the duration. No demand. No watchful escort. There weren't even working locks on the door. By all appearances, Erwin was a traveler who had hitched a ride with the man and promised to be discreet while he conducted his business.

Erwin completed his test - and it was a test - by returning to his room and getting on with his inventory review until the rumble of the engine informed him that the deal was done.

***

Everything was going fine.  _ Too _ fine. Levi reminded himself that it had been mere days since he’d had the other man on board, a little over an Earth week since Smith had been forced into travelling with him. He was sub-par at dusting and halfway decent with his wiping, extraordinary at inventory revision and review, and consistently fascinated by the contents of Levi’s ship. For his part, Levi ignored the incessant questions and continued to give him little but curt orders and flat statements. 

His first of many scheduled barters came and went without a hitch. Maybe there was no need to doubt Smith’s newfound motivation to meet his employer, no need for the handcuffs ready in his pocket and his blaster back in its holster. Smith obeyed his commands to the last word and completed his inventory check in the cell. The cameras confirmed it. The hidden cameras confirmed the cameras.

Levi had the uncanny feeling that his resistance was being worn down.

One night cycle, after triple-checking that Smith was indeed sound asleep in the cell, Levi accessed his secret channel once more.

“Leeeviiiiiiii!” 

He winced and almost threw his headset away at Hange’s exuberance. “Fuck, Hange, tone it down.”

“Oops.” They gave vent to a mad giggle. “Sorry, just celebrating successful test results. How goes the voyage?”

“Fine,” was the automatic response. Then, “Did you hear about Kos?”

“What about Kos? That they got a stick up their-”

“The eco-lockdown.”

Hange blinked slowly. Levi explained.

“Are you serious? Damn.” Hange whistled. “How did you get out of  _ that _ ?”

“The Mark-” Levi hesitated. “Smith helped.”

“Did you say the Mark  _ helped  _ you?”

Levi described what Smith had done and was met with silence for a long moment.

“Levi,” Hange said slowly, “why did you-”

“I don’t know,” he cut in impatiently. “Anyway, it worked, didn’t it?”

There was another pause before Hange spoke, and their voice was uncharacteristically serious. “Levi, you’ve got to be careful. You remember what they said about him, don’t you? He’s supposed to be really good at reading and manipulating people. One of the more dangerous snakes in the Capitol, even at his age-”

“I remember.” Levi sighed, massaged his forehead. “I remember everything.”

“Good. Watch your back, I’m telling you.” Hange let out a rough sigh. “I’m guessing because of the Kos thing you’re going to take longer to get here?”

“Yeah, weeks delayed.” Hange let out a groan, and Levi added, “But. I finally got your silicon transponders.”

Hange began to screech with joy again.

  
  


***

One day, the captain installed the very same locks at his room's door that he had before, shoved him inside, and demanded he explain how he'd done it. Though it pained him, Erwin divulged his technique and, just what he'd expect from a man confident enough to maintain an engine and life support system on his own, the captain picked it up quickly. Erwin slipped in an anecdote about his father, from whom he'd learned, or of the lazy summers practicing in his long gone childhood home on Earth. It was a cynical ploy, he knew. Knowing Erwin as more than an asset may make the captain more amenable to a compromise or a better deal than whatever his employer offered. Yet it came naturally, somewhat apologetically. The captain never responded to Erwin's brief asides. But he never stopped him.

The ever-changing stock gave Erwin plenty to do, and occasionally, they would find themselves both in the cargo bay, silently but not uncomfortably working around one another as if that was all this was. As if this man he works with, lives with, and eats with is not bringing him - in the event that his technician could not extract the intel safely - to his death.

The captain worked through his meals clockwise. His penmanship was exquisite, even standoffish. He made tea slowly, the old fashioned way, and with loose leaves. He shook off artigravity muscle tension with a slow, sweeping capoeira in the cargo bay without a care for whether Erwin was in or out, staring or trying not to stare. He watched raunchy old sitcoms on the bridge with the lights down and the volume obnoxiously high. He pretended not to hear Erwin recommend a favorite murder-mystery serial, though the familiar sound of its title sequence once filtered through the ship to Erwin's ears as he fell asleep.

The dossier Erwin compiled in his head of this captain only grew, and his options with it.

***

_ He’s trying to manipulate you _ .

Levi had to tell himself this more and more as the days passed, as the two of them shifted into an inevitable routine, as they began to learn more and more about the other, accidentally or not. Smith spoke of his boyhood, of his inelegant upbringing, of his unimportant schoolteacher father. He certainly seemed to have a talent in instruction as he explained patiently and precisely how he had shorted the locks. Levi found himself turning increasingly careful with his words and his reactions, and yet when the time came to sleep, found himself obsessing over every second of their conversations, paranoid that he had let something slip, that he had given him the upper hand.

Despite the knowledge that Erwin Smith wouldn’t be around for much longer, that Levi would return home at long last, a routine  _ was _ established, and Levi sometimes wondered how he had travelled alone for so long. At this point he had been operating by himself longer than he had with Isabel and Farlan. He had convinced himself that he hadn’t needed anybody else, that no one else would ever make a suitable co-traveller. Not even Hange, whose friendship he was grateful for, but whose presence he could only handle in small bouts.

But Erwin somehow managed to be exactly that: suitable. He was diligent, clean, and self-reliant. Quiet when he needed to be, but his chatter was keen, insightful, and seemingly sincere.

It got to a point where Levi genuinely enjoyed a serial that Smith had suggested, and he had to wonder: what was so manipulative about recommending a whodunnit?

  
  


***

Five deliveries remained on the captain's schedule, known to Erwin because he was the one preparing them. Five exchanges, three systems, at least three weeks. Erwin would have marveled at how much access he was given, had he not been perfectly aware that it was bait. That the captain spoiled him and waited for a single excuse to tie him up again. For all his talents, Erwin was helpless to a sturdy chair and a good length of rope.

Not that he needed an excuse. Erwin's intervention with the Kos must have meant more to him than he let on. How much more could one man do? Maintaining enormous stock, maintaining a ship. He had little time to sleep, let alone keep apace with interstellar politics and exclusion zones. Erwin could be worth more to him personally than whatever it was his employer offered.

Prior to one delivery with a merchant species he knew well, Erwin requested his ear as he negotiated, and fed him lines and mannerisms from afar that must have made him quite a bit more return on investment given that the captain demanded he keep talking during the next delivery, and the one after that, and all the rest.

More than once, they stayed up late at night - simulated by the ship's clock so as not to disturb humans' natural circadian rhythm - trading stories of their travels as they polished or fastened or repaired this or that trinket or case. The captain slipped that he might have had a crew, once. That no replacement since had ever felt good, felt right. Erwin, in turn, volunteered how many friends he'd lost attempting to cut through Capitol red tape. Lost to fear, to intrigue, to dismay.

Just another ploy to render himself sympathetic. But he didn't feign the weight in his chest settling and lifting as he divulged to and commiserated with the man. Only when he returned to his room did he realize he'd never spoken those thoughts aloud before. He had no confidants who did not live and breathe Capitol politics, and those who did should not have to bear the weight of his anxieties, should not have their faith in the system shaken by one of its keepers.

***

Levi didn't consider himself a proud man by any standard. Of course, he had a healthy amount of self-respect, enough to ensure his survival in the cutthroat world he was raised in. He knew perfectly well that he was one of the best at what he did, that he knew the best places to go, the best people to ply, and the best words to speak in any of his innumerable missions.

But these days, Levi found himself questioning his hard-earned experience, all thanks to Smith. For his next stop, Levi had let slip that he would be dealing with Slytheni nomads, and immediately Smith had asked to observe the negotiation. Before Levi could even think of an excuse to deny him, Smith had assured him that he wouldn't participate in any form, only listen in through Levi's comms from afar. It was a rare opportunity to study the Slytheni pidgin in use, so he said.

And once again, Smith had been an unexpected help. He had rattled off some Slytheni riddle or pun or some shit in his ear, which Levi had hesitantly used in the conversation. The Slytheni were delighted; they became noticeably friendlier and Levi ended up with a better bargain than he could have hoped for.

Later, Smith admitted that he had a special interest in the Slytheni tongue mainly because he shared their (actual quote) 'punny sense of humour’, and Levi couldn't believe, he  _ couldn't fucking believe _ that this man was one of the highest ranking diplomats in the political cesspool of the Capitol.

Still, that he had been an asset was undeniable, and his support with the Slytheni deal, let alone the Kos, made it easy to decide to let Smith sit in on all his future transactions. The man stayed out of sight, only murmuring phrases, suggestions and observations into Levi's ear when needed. This practice became so routine that Levi could barely remember how he ever used to manage without Smith's low, confident comments in his ear guiding his transactions.

The weeks began to blend together and Levi found himself getting used to the other man's presence in his life: slowly, reluctantly, and unintentionally. He revealed himself little by little, a new layer shed with each passing day.

Levi learned that for all his affable conversation, Smith had the look of a lonely man, that he had a large list of acquaintances out of which he could count on a single hand the people he truly trusted with his life. He learned that he hated the crust of bread slices, that he took precisely 45 seconds to brush his teeth, that he had a whorl on the back of his blond head that made it all stick up in every direction in the morning, that he enjoyed music but was hopelessly tone-deaf, that he had broken his left ankle as a teenager and it had never felt the same again. 

Even the discomforting attention to his mouth revealed itself to be only practical - only when Levi spoke did those eyes dart to his lips as if to read them, as if mister perfectly-put-together diplomat was a little hard of hearing. That it was only this and nothing more should be a relief, Levi reminded himself. Repeatedly. 

And somehow, Levi found himself talking in turn about his favourite tea blends, about Isabel and Farlan, his reckless escapes in the early days, the burn on his forearm that had been caused by, of all things, a slippery teakettle; he even shared an anecdote or two on Kenny's ridiculously dangerous parenting methods. He couldn't remember the last time he had spoken of these things, and he eventually stopped asking himself why he did now. He declined to share just how much he leaned on his ears and hands to make up for his ailing eyes -there are many ways to see. But as the ship's clock swept one inexorable day past another, Levi found his mistrust crumbling bit by bit with each induced cycle of day and night.

***

The ship was not especially well protected from passing signals. He’d been spoiled by accommodations on official Capitol ships. Erwin had been caught deaf to the captain's questions or orders more than once when some errant broadcast blared unwelcome in his ears, and his excuses were wearing thin. 

The occasional spikes of whines and static were bearable, until they weren't.

He grit his teeth through the rising noise as he repaired a hinge on a case of glassworks on one wall of the bridge. The screwdriver kept slipping out of his shaking, sweating hands. He'd ignored it for too long, assuming it would pass like the others. This one was not like the others.

The noise was catastrophic. It rumbled from his ears to his head and down to his last fingers and toes and reverberated through his rib cage. Erwin sank to the floor and rested his head against the cool wall. The last time it had been this loud on some routine assignment, he had to be sedated. The time before, placed in a medically induced coma. Both occasions had not been accidental.

His vision tightened. Something wasn't right. As hands fell on him, he marveled at the immediacy, the efficiency of it. It should take hours to build to such a crescendo.

"We're being," Erwin whispered to the bewildered captain before slipping into the dark, "followed."


	4. Chapter 4

“Smith? Smith!” Levi shook the man’s shoulder, but he only slumped further against the wall. “ _ Erwin _ !” No response.

Levi took a step back and sucked in a harsh breath. “Fuck, fuck,  _ fuck _ .” He ran for the dashboard, flicked through command modules in his HUD, when a sudden flicker in his vision made him freeze in his tracks. Fuck, not now,  _ not now _ , but his vision began to glitch in a familiar manner, static invaded his peripherals, and nausea began to roil in his gut. 

He grit his teeth and pressed his hands onto his eyes. “Not now…” He whined softly and headed to the dashboard, his steps faltering, his eyes watering from how aggressively he was blinking them, phosphenes staining the buzzing static in the borders with ugly colours. He sank heavily onto his seat, punched in the manual override code, and ran the proximity sensor. 

Nothing.

_ Bullshit _ . A wave of nausea sent him to his knees. He flickered in and out of consciousness, riding the crest of the wave and hauling himself back up when he felt the trough. 

He recalibrated the sensor’s reach and ran it again.  _ There _ . A blip, a mere blinking dot on his screen, but one that could be a warship hundred times bigger than his craft. Or a sleek, fast, anti-personnel cruiser. Whatever it was, it had a scrambler on board. Levi remembered the list of failsafes Erwin had given him, a dozen delicate pressure plates being hammered on by this ship. 

Delivery number four would be delayed, the engine would take a hit, but it couldn’t be helped. Levi fired up the thrusters and plotted a jump to an adjacent sector. He didn’t even wait to strap in as he surrendered control to the autopilot, blinking away tears from his pounding head, Levi stumbled back to the man lying prone on the bridge, his vision flickering incessantly. The steady shiplights appeared to be strobing and he could taste bile on the back of his throat. He fell to his knees in front of his hostage, or else the miasma of shifting shapes and blurry contours he assumed was the man, and reached for him blindly. He needed to get him to the Medbay, needed to insulate that damned head.

“Erwin,” Levi heard himself slurring as he felt around while his eyes gave him little more to work with than a windshield in a monsoon. His fingers found cool metal, what must have been the closed console just behind his ear… and like a spark igniting a hydrogen flame, his vision flared before clearing entirely. Levi was suddenly hyperaware of every single strand of brilliant gold hair shining an eerie green in the blue backlights, every pore and every single drop of sweat on the man’s pale face, and, every single fleck and shade of vibrant blue as Erwin opened his eyes blearily, his gaze unfocused.

The ship rumbled around them as it performed the spacejump, but Levi didn’t feel a thing, caught in those blue, blue eyes and coming to the harrowing conclusion that he was about to learn more about this man than he ever intended.

He flinched back, bringing his tingling hands to his sides and taking deep breaths to calm his racing heart. “Are you alright?” He managed to drawl in a monotone, forcing a normal expression onto his face, his vision still filled with pure, unadulterated, high-definition Erwin Smith.

  
  


***

Erwin came to as the floor rumbled harshly under his body, under his pounding skull. He willed himself onto his back with a low whine as he registered the captain kneeling beside him, veiled in the blue of the ship lights.

He sighed haltingly. The captain's words, through even the dizzying beat of his headache and the whine of the engine, were clear. Clear of static, clear of noise. The low, tight rumble Erwin heard for the first time met his ears and sank into his chest. His eyes brimmed at the sound.

"I'm-" Erwin paused, not recognizing the unadulterated sound of his own voice, "Yes."

He could hear his own voice. He could hear the captain's. He didn't need to lip read to pick up the words he missed in that soup of everlasting static.

"This happened before," Erwin said as the captain hauled him up and took him to the med bay. Erwin passed a hand over the console behind his ear as he lay on the bed where the diagnostic scanner swept over his body. His nerves sang at the myriad blips and whirs of the machinery, at the musical hum of the engine, at the sharp sound of their footfalls.

"Captain-" He stopped himself yet again, now as his higher brain came online, so to speak, and insisted he think this over, weigh his options, but he couldn't wait any longer. He'd waited long enough.

His corrupted neural implants had rejected every therapy and repair and update. All but, theoretically, a neural recalibration with a person possessing the same implant, down to the same model sourced from the same mineral deposit and manufactured at the same factory.

The static began to return, just as it had before.

Erwin turned to the captain as the scanner completed its sweep and returned to its berth. "Touch me again."

***

Levi sputtered. “What the- what do you mean-” And then, he stopped, his heart beginning to race. Smith’s words filtered through as his vision began to dull at the edges, and Levi would physically drag that inimitable shade of blue back into the man’s eyes if he could.

_ This happened before. _

Levi swallowed hard, licked dry lips. “Do you-” He paused, teetering on the edge of his secret, swallowed again and took the plunge. “Do you glitch too?

  
  


***   
  


Erwin sighed sharply with relief. He wasn't delusional. He hadn't been hearing things. It was true. 

"Yes," he breathed. "My-" He sat up too quickly. He lay back down to quell the wave of nausea at the returning static.

"My hearing. No," he said to the sudden uncertainty in the captain's face, "you needn't tell me yours if you don’t want to, just-" He stopped. He laughed softly at himself, how desperate he must sound. He barely noticed his own hand slowly reaching, open-palmed, for the captain, for the man's own console, before remembering himself and starting to lower it.

***

Levi’s hand shot out before he could even think it, his fingers catching Smith’s wrist in a vice-like grip. Slowly,  _ slowly _ , because this seemed too important for haste, more delicate than any trap he’d ever slipped through; so slowly he could see every shift in Smith’s expression, every glimmer of hope and anticipation and fear in his eyes, Levi brought his willing hand to the side of his head.

Erwin Smith’s warm palm cradled his head as Levi’s vision cleared out once more like alum in sludge, colours blooming until they shone, they dazzled, they hurt. His head swam and he must have made some embarrassing sound he couldn’t care less about.

“You-” Levi took in a sharp breath. “You.”

***

Erwin passed his fingers over the cool metal of the console fitted to the captain’s head as the static died yet again. His thumb swept across his warm cheek, his small ear. It was too quiet. All that existed in the world were the man’s hushed words and tight breathing and his own deafening heartbeat. The engine-rumble ceased. They had escaped, only to have become ensnared in something else entirely.

“Captain,” he sighed.

It was too incredible. It was obscene. It was unfair. 

"What have we done to deserve meeting like this?"

  
  


***   
  


Levi remembered with perfect clarity the moment he had explained the glitch to Hange, shamefaced, embarrassed. To their credit, Hange had been kind, patient, had explained in turn what they could and could not do to fix him. Especially the part about finding someone with the exact same neural implants as him, raw materials and all.

“Essentially,” Hange had smirked, “you’d have to find your implant soulmate.” And Levi had snorted away the comment.

He wasn’t laughing now. Erwin’s hand felt like a brand on his skin, his gentle touch set his insides lurching. He felt sick. He felt like he was flying.

“I.” He couldn’t speak,  _ fuck _ , he couldn’t say a word. What could he say? What answer could he give to the man’s flippant, all-important question? Instead, he answered the question hanging between them for weeks now. 

“Levi,” he said, harsh, yet soft, focused on blue, blue, blue. “My name. I’m Levi.”

  
  



	5. Chapter 5

The captain - Levi - left without waiting for a response. Once cleared by the scanner, Erwin joined him where he plotted a new course at the bridge and confirmed his suspicion that something like a Capitol stalker vessel had been sent to scramble the intel from afar. 

Whether or not it scrambled Erwin's mind with it must have been no concern of theirs. Typical of the urgently secretive Capitol circles and yet surprising to the captain, who must have assumed that Erwin himself was at least as important as the data in his head. 

They returned to their cataloging and buffing in a vain attempt at collecting the shattered pieces of an old routine. Erwin was grateful for the distraction. He recoiled at every base urge to figure out how to play this to his advantage. This chance meeting, this impossible connection, it rendered everything else petty to the point of absurdity. Levi avoided him. 

He plucked at the iridescent strings of a third age Opolli lute and lost himself in the sound.

Once the novelty of it settled, Levi may become less impressed. He'd gotten on with his faulty implant for this long, and whatever it was that he was being paid or offered in exchange for Erwin could easily outweigh the promise of relief for a small inconvenience. He may even command a higher price.

It was a fine time to unshackle any assumptions he may have formed about him, any attachments to the furrow in his brow when he focused on something, to the rare little smiles Erwin pretended not to see. Static plucked at the lute’s last notes.

  
  


***

Levi hadn’t wanted this assignment. It had been almost a decade since he had given up on jobs like this. Since then, the most lethal parts of his occupation were black market sources and paperless deals. He hurt nothing and no one except for a few deserving, naïve wallets.

When Kenny vanished and Levi’s little found family became his crew, he was unstoppable. A hired gun. He honed his skill with each assignment, spilling more blood with each hit. He’d been Rose Corp’s greatest asset.

One botched hit was enough to change it all. Isabel and Farlan were there one moment and gone the next. Rose discarded the gun that gave them an empire. 

He’d found clarity as his legs dangled from the lip of the Port City’s tallest towers, as the simulated winds nudged him closer to the edge. He had enough contacts to retire to a life of trinket running from one sector to another, pouring every coin he didn’t need for engine grease or rations into the hands of street urchins or mothers or  _ anyone  _ who looked like they gave a shit about the Underground, those lower Port levels to which Levi owed his life, whatever its worth.

Until the call came for Erwin Smith.

Levi wanted to refuse. Nothing could entice him to return to his wetwork days, no fee high enough to face the shitting Capitol. His Rose contact had smiled serenely, unsurprised, and explained.

Rose was done playing in the Underground. They were eyeing wealthier zones. They were willing to offer Levi clemency, a reward that could settle Levi  _ and _ Hange for life, and more importantly, a legal guarantee that they wouldn’t meddle in his district’s councils and markets again. That last part had given him pause. The Underground had languished under Rose’s thumb for years. Levi had lapped up their propaganda and understood too late his role in spreading their thorny vines. Securing Erwin Smith’s intel meant Rose would uproot itself and plant themselves somewhere else, anywhere else.

A hefty advance was deposited in his account, legal documents confirming lease cessations and lobbying bans were handed to him, and Levi had set off. One last job, one last chance for some fucking peace _ . _

Then, Erwin Smith. 

The man could incite and inspire change, of that Levi had to only skim any day’s Capitol news. Speeches here, votes whipped there, allegations of secret networks everywhere. His meteoric rise in the Capitol was no accident. And since meeting him, Levi had realised: Erwin was an asset. He was knowledgeable, cunning, quick. He had managed to squirrel through the cracks in Levi's walls in ways not even Isabel or Farlan or Hange could have done. 

Then, this damned glitch. 

This time, Levi's vision stayed crystal clear for hours. Everything looked brand new to his repaired eyesight. He found himself spacing out, staring with equal fascination at the gleam of his crockery and the dazzling nebulae beyond his dashboard. 

When the fuzziness and grey and warbling shapes began to reappear, he wanted to break something, everything. He longed to go back to him. His fingertips itched for the cool metal of Erwin’s console. His pupils strained for clarity. 

But he didn't dare go.  _ Manipulative _ screeched in his mind again.   
  


***   
  


Two hours and three minutes passed before the noise returned in full and pulled Erwin out of paradise. Erwin waited another hour, and another. The captain did not seek him out, and Erwin didn't dare tip his own hand. His mood soured as he completed the day's inventory and returned to his room. His own footsteps revolted him, when just hours before he'd walked and walked and walked to hear that perfect tap, the faithful echo. He'd passed all the strange, wonderful chugging and gurgling and hissing emanating from the recycling center and life support and engine. He'd hum in tune with that engine and startle at every errant clank or thud. It was all new. It was all gone.

He plucked at the lute again when he passed it. The sound snapped and crackled when it should have warbled a heavenly little note. 

A too-loud rumble shuddered through the ship. Non-essential power whined down. Something was wrong.

  
  


***   
  


His console began to blink in an array of beeps and alarms. The engine stalled, and one by one, his onboard systems began to shut down until only life support, artigrav, and the emergency lighting remained.

The spacejump had done more damage than he thought. He made his way to the engine room with a sigh. Barely minutes into his tinkering, he heard the man's hesitant footsteps at the door. 

He sighed once again, softer. Might as well get him to help.

Levi waved him in, ignoring the awkward silence, the way the other man refused to meet his eyes. He ran the list once more on his HUD. The coolant needed refilling, the fuses needed to be replaced, the valves needed to be recalibrated, the pistons lubricated, system rebooting subroutines to be run.

He got Erwin started on the fuses while he maneuvered himself underneath the massive valves to begin working on them. It was too quiet. Levi had gotten used to an odd little quip or observation from Smith, but he was now completely mute. Any silence between them was usually comfortable, but now was anything but.

Levi blinked futilely to clear the swimming shapes in his eyes. He had been granted glorious, unencumbered vision but for a few hours, and he had already acclimatized to it. Now that these smears were back, the dim glow of the auxiliary lights in the engine room conspired to blind him entirely. In his position beneath the valve system, he had almost no light at all, and had to reposition the parts by feeling around. By the time he extracted himself, irritation crackled up his spine.

Smith still didn’t say a word, and finished replacing the fuses just as Levi stood up. He simply turned in expectation of the next command, and Levi practically growled at him to refill the coolant tank.

Smith frowned, and didn’t move.

Levi grit his teeth and pointed. “Tch. The coolant. There.” 

His should-be-blue eyes squinted at Levi’s mouth in the dull lighting. Fortunately, he seemed to have understood, but for some reason, Levi was even more irritated. He watched Smith approach the coolant tank, then slow down, then come to a complete halt.

“What is it?” He barked, but Smith didn’t answer him, only took a brief step back. Levi could see his thick eyebrows twisting, his nose wrinkling, as if in pain. He started to ask him what the matter was again when it hit him. The coolant tank, still active on reduced capacity, hummed deeply up close. What was simply a louder hum for Levi was probably cacophony for Smith.

Levi watched him grimace through it, his golden head dull and grainy in the low lighting, and he  _ snapped _ .

He marched up to him, turned Smith to face him. Erwin’s eyes were wide, his mouth open on a question as Levi shot his hand up to touch the console, burying his fingers into smooth golden hair.

***   
  


Erwin's hands shot to the captain's wrist at his brisk approach. His palm, still warm from handling overheated parts, pressed firmly behind his ear. Erwin sighed haltingly as Levi revealed that tortuous whine for the deep hum it really was. His body sagged with relief.

"I thought-" Erwin stopped. The captain shouldn't know what he thought, shouldn't know that Erwin took his absence, his silence, for indifference, that the thought of finding another like him, despite odds that favored winning the lottery several dozen consecutive times, who cared so little because his precious paycheck came first, revolted him. 

It revolted the five year old newly implanted with the only model his father could afford. The sick-of-cognitive-therapies ten year old. The college dropout who no one believed about the screaming fluorescent lights. The pilot who could not stand engine-roar. The soldier who could not shoot a gun. The miserable wretch who eavesdropped, lied, bribed, forged, stole, framed, fucked and smiled all the way to the Capitol Station. By the time he was important enough to have the newest hardware integrated with the old, he hardly needed it anymore, and all it could do was dampen the very worst of the peaks. He could lip-read and sign in several dozens of interstellar languages and he'd long ago grown accustomed to the world's ugly sounds.

Every one of his selves in every moment at every point in his life had hoped and dreamed of meeting just a single one of the few dozen people in the galaxy whose parents were likewise fooled into or desperate enough to buy bootleg implants designed to keep their minds from coming undone by all the little mundane psychosomatic trials of space-travel. 

Because the bootlegs relied on an outdated network-based operating system, they performed best only among those with the same tech. It was crude, impractical, and imperfect, but it was the very first, and it allowed humanity to live beyond Earth. Centuries later, all it took was one enterprising person with arsenic for a soul to discover abandoned factory stock and decide to make a penny. 

A few dozen were fooled, investigators said. Many were conned long ago, and had already lived out their natural lives. The others are untraceable. Forget about it. Take your lot. 

Erwin did, until he won the lottery what felt like several hundred million consecutive times, before being struck by proverbial lightning. 

"I-" He couldn't do it. He couldn't think with his palm on him like this, as if it wouldn't be the very same that will tie him up once they dock and pass appreciatively over his reward while Erwin's brain becomes sludge in the hands of some back alley technician and his body incinerated to hide the evidence. This firm but gentle touch, these clever, softening grey eyes, all their little jokes and easy camaraderie and tentative unburdenings. They were nothing. Ashes, as he soon will be.

"If only I could ask how little this means to you that you haven't changed course. That you'd hand me over anyway," Erwin said in a voice that was his and yet not. It was the ten year old and the dropout and the soldier and the wretch. Levi froze. 

"I won't. I wouldn't want to be undiplomatic. Take whatever you want," he said, as the captain physically recoiled. "While you can."

Erwin turned to repair the coolant tanks, and for the first time in his life, wished for static. 

  
  


***   
  


Levi stared at him. “You-” He took a step forward.

“Who the  _ fuck  _ are you to judge me, asshole?” Another furious step. “You think you know me so well? Got me all mapped out in that twisted fucking brain of yours?”

Never had Levi been accused like this. The very implication that he would _take_, when all his life he had done nothing but give, give, fucking _give_ all the time, every chance of a ‘normal’ childhood, every part of his soul given to the darkness in exchange for food, for shelter and security, every last memory of Farlan and Isabel, every single fucking time he had given and given and now this arrogant _fucker_-

“ _ Look  _ at me,” Levi seethed.

  
  


***   
  


Erwin removed a bent screw. "No."   
  
  


***   
  


He could see the twill of Erwin’s shirt, the gold sheen of the back of his head with perfect clarity, even in the dim lights. And all Levi wanted to do was punch and kick and stab and throw and make him eat his words.

“I  _ said-”  _ Levi grabbed his shoulder roughly and turned him around to face him. The bolt clattered loudly to the ground. Erwin’s face was smooth stone.

  
  


***

Erwin allowed the captain to whirl him around. There was a frenzied desperation in his eyes Erwin had never seen before, had never been allowed to see.

"Are you enjoying our game of pretend, captain, where I play your carefree servant and interpreter and crew? You must be. For some reason, you think my opinion of you will matter when my liver and kidneys are floating through the organ trade while you live like a king."

***   
  


The fire raging in Levi’s veins was snuffed out by a sudden chill. His fist fell from Erwin’s shoulder and loosened. He felt a sudden hysterical urge to laugh.

He’d been right all along. Manipulative bastard _ . _

“You... really don’t know me at all,” Levi said, low, dangerous; then sneered. “Too bad your little ‘game of pretend’ didn’t work at all. Have you had enough of my generosity? Should I bring back the handcuffs?”   
  


***   
  


"Don’t know you? I know you get distracted when clients bring kids. Your asking price always plummets and you never let them leave without some small shiny thing that could buy a house. I knew you lost two of your crew from the bridge seats you leave empty even when the others are piled to the ceiling with stock. You have a limp you can almost hide and too many scars. You must have been a mercenary, and you must've hated it after a while. Left it and started a new life. One you care about. Until, who knows. You were threatened or enticed to go back, though you still hate it. Why else threaten me and look so miserable doing it?" 

"I never pretended to like being your crew. I only pretended I wasn't afraid." Erwin said. "That it could last."

The engine room thrummed beautifully. He may never hear this sound again.

"I can't anymore."

Levi released him as Erwin stooped to pick up the bolt and place it in his palm. "I'll wait in my cell. I'll leave the locks alone."   
  


***   
  


Levi was left reeling. With each word, he felt like he was being stripped of every piece of armour he had painstakingly built around himself over the years: Erwin had seen  _ everything _ . And yet... 

Levi thought he had made some progress in understanding the man, but he realised that he had barely scratched the surface. He couldn’t believe that Erwin Smith could be so perceptively clever, and yet so amazingly  _ dense  _ at the same time.

“ _ No _ .” He said, loud and decisive, when Erwin tried to leave. “Get back here, we’re not done.” Erwin only halted and turned to him. Levi advanced toward him once more, slowly, with all the care of approaching a reared snake. “You think-” He paused, gathering his scattered thoughts, combing through the jumble of words in his head. “You saw- you made all these little fucking observations, and  _ this _ is what you think of me? You think some extra digits in my account is enough to make me do  _ this _ ?”

***   
  


"Of course I don't really-" Erwin’s temper seized him as he took his shoulders in his hands.

"Think, for just one second, think, Levi. I am a senior Capitol diplomat. Half of that station owes me a favor. The other half owes ten. I owe enough in return to make many heads of state very, very angry with whoever orchestrated this and made me unable to repay them. Whoever is threatening you, whoever is forcing you to do this, I can ruin them with one call."

Erwin watched hope and doubt war on his face. He let go of his shoulders and took one of Levi's hands in both his own. 

"Ask me for a favor. Ask anything."   
  



	6. Chapter 6

Levi’s throat went dry. That Erwin was willing to offer, that he would.

For him.

“I.” Levi’s voice came out in a rough rasp, and he cleared his throat and slowly pulled his hand away. “I. I’m not being threatened.” He looked away, unable to meet his stare, especially now that he could perfectly see every sapphire striation in them.

“I’m. Sorry, but I can’t ask you that.” He risked a glance at Erwin’s face, and felt a sudden twist in his gut when he saw the stone-cold expression. “Wait,” he said hurriedly, grabbing Erwin’s wrist and felt a small twinge of relief when he didn’t pull away. “I wasn’t forced to do this, but, the reward… It’s not money.”

Erwin’s gaze softened in the pause, and Levi felt suddenly weak, drained. Finally, finally, he could just  _ tell _ him. “If I do this last thing, I can go home. And they’ll leave. Rose will leave me and the Underground alone.” Levi looked at the floor again. “At long fucking last.”

  
  


***

"My old friend," Erwin frowned. “That blight of a company.”

"They promised to leave the district only after they killed all the other business, shoved out all the residents and left it withered and abandoned, didn't they?" At Levi's careful nod, he said, "They lied to you. They’ve done this before, they're leaving now so they can buy the land later when it depreciates entirely and sells for pennies, raze it to the ground, and rebuild it exactly as they want it."

***

"How do you-"

  
  


***

"We have a history. Their lobbyists have been flooding the Capitol promising sweet things to any member of parliament who votes to privatize the Port. But they're missing votes. They'll never budge, those reps, I know them too well."

They're good colleagues, great friends. There's no end to their conviction, but a fair few are easily intimidated, easily fooled. More than once, Erwin whipped their votes himself to keep the Port, the largest and densest single station in the galaxy, free of corporate rule. 

He told the captain as much.

“I just don’t understand what possible intel Rose would-” Erwin stopped dead.

To behemoths like Rose, information was cheap. It would never risk going to these lengths, these extraordinarily public, sensationalized lengths for mere information. Why, too, send one man and one who did not know how to safely extract it? Why send a career merc who would have no choice but to-

“Fuck.”

"Rose never wanted this intel," Erwin said at Levi’s questioning frown.

Levi’s eyes flew open as he, too, understood.

"They want me."

Anyone else would have done, but they couldn't resist him. The message to the Capitol was simple. Carrot, or stick.

"If you deliver me, you won't just lose the Underground. Rose, Maria and the rest, they'll prove they can disappear anyone. They will own the Port. You could have suspected it if they had told you to take me outright, but they knew you would have no choice but to take me and be no wiser that its what they wanted from the start." 

  
  


***

“Fuck off,” Levi said in disbelief.

Rage blazed through him. How could he have not seen this? After years of being at their beck and call and then thrown aside when it was convenient, how could he have been so gullible, so desperate?

“I’m-” He spun around, ruffling his hair agitatedly. “I’m a fucking  _ idiot _ .” He heard Erwin call his name and held up his palm to silence him. “No. This is my fault. All this-” And just as suddenly as the fury came, it was gone, leaving him hollow.

“I helped then. Before. I was their gun, their dog. For  _ years _ .” His head hung low, shame crawling through his skin. “Even now, I’m helping them.”

Erwin said his name again, and it was the way he said it, soft and understanding, that made Levi whip around to face him. 

“I’ll take that favour.”

***   
  


It took some time to convince the captain that they would be delivering Erwin anyway. It had taken nearly as long to convince himself.

If they turned at this very moment, there would be nowhere to go. Erwin would return to the Capitol, if they didn’t catch him first. Levi would go into hiding, if they didn’t catch him first. If they ever meet again, it would be infrequent and clandestine. It would be imperfect and dangerous and not nearly enough. Whatever luck they will have will end eventually. Levi will need to evade Capitol police and Rose bounty hunters every time, but they would need to catch him only once. He will wither in a cell far less generous than the one he'd given him while Erwin begs the polity to turn on the company that signs their checks. 

No. They can’t go back. They need evidence. They need to implicate Rose when her agents least expect it. When they believe they have already won.

The captain protested. He railed and howled in what he imagined to be anger and yet Erwin heard only fear. There was no bottom to the well of adjectives Levi had for his plan and yet their course remained the same. Every simulated morning, their course remained the same. 

When Levi wasn't sniping holes into his plan, he was silent. He made himself scarce. For a man who slipped past so many of the Capitol's cunning, invisible defenses, his own could not be more plain. He was afraid. 

Erwin returned with an amended plan. Levi shot it down. Erwin repaired it. Levi cut out its eyes. Erwin gave it new ones. With each resurrected version, Levi's lethality diminished until he could only scratch, only bruise. Erwin returned. Levi sniped. Again. Again.

***

Erwin Smith was certifiably insane. Levi was given a live, close-up demonstration of the diplomat’s famous strategising, but some of his theories and plans were so outlandishly risky that Levi wondered if he had climbed the ranks of the Capitol on the strength of his asspulls alone: in fact, he said as much to Erwin, who took his every scathing comment seriously and returned with even more outlandish plans for his approval, only for the cycle to repeat.

He was a persistent bastard. He always came up with a countermeasure, always had something to patch the holes Levi tore into his plans. And all of it with unchanging patience, even as Levi’s irritation escalated.

“No. Dead before contact.”

“Dead on arrival.”

“Us and what army, Erwin?”

“Do you  _ want _ to die, shithead?”

“And then what, we magic ourselves out of there?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Are you  _ that  _ fucking insane?”

Each time, Levi waited and watched, certain he had reached the limit. Each time, he waited for Erwin to snap, to do  _ something _ other than nod, or hum, or even smile at his crude language. He was too fucking calm, and Levi couldn’t stand it. Not when Erwin refused to even consider the simplest option: to return to their respective lives before they had met --no, practically  _ crashed  _ into each other’s spheres. 

So he wouldn’t see bright colours again. And Erwin would have to go back to lip-reading. They would live, as they had, all their lives. Big fucking deal.

Erwin said they couldn’t let Rose get away with it, and Levi said they already had,  _ he  _ had already let them.

Erwin simply disagreed and continued to plan. Levi continued to fret.   
  
  


***

The ship had no material on their first gen implants, but Erwin recalled enough from his study of it. There was a way to calibrate them to function for longer, much longer, than the meager hour or two they got before they needed contact again. Days. A week, if they were lucky. Even more with proper equipment. 

A physical, wired sync running from one console port to the other. They wouldn't have to enter the lion's den without their eyes or ears. The last hole in their plan. The last place Levi kept kicking and prodding. Filled by a straightforward, layman procedure and yet one more intimate than it had any right to be. 

Maybe it wasn't. The first spacefarers did this all the time. Maybe it was Erwin who wasn't as objective as he would have liked to be.

Was it an issue of trust? He should be over that. Logically, he knew his captor's change of heart will take more time for Erwin to process, to accept, but that was one currency they had in short supply. He would just need to get over it, over the stomach-churning fear and dizzying desperation he'd felt only days ago despite all his smiles and genial small talk. He'd been a day or two away from convincing himself to risk cooking his brain by interfacing with the ion field generator and shorting the barrier to the escape pod. He could have stubbornly, vindictively, killed himself to deny the captain and his employers their satisfaction.

Erwin drafted a message on a data pad explaining the physical sync and sent it to the captain to read at his leisure. Erwin wouldn't be able to handle his questions in real time, not yet. He had plenty, still, for himself. 

The engine hummed blissfully along as the ship lights dimmed around him. They'd been sparring over the plans for a day and a half or more. 

Erwin hadn't made much progress with the third century hand-scribed replica manifesto in his hands. He hadn't budged from one sentence in half an hour. His heart wouldn’t end its incessant hammering.

If the plan worked perfectly, Rose would be implicated, but unless they planned to argue that Rose controlled Levi's every thought and limb, he could never be absolved entirely. Plead insanity? Bribe the jury? No matter what their luck, no matter what they pulled off, Levi's trial would take years. They will take a microscope to every breath he ever took, every word he did and didn't say, every drop of blood he'd ever spilled. He would never do it. He would never stay. That wasn't his life. Erwin could not make it so. 

The door to his room opened without a knock.

  
  


***

They began to experiment. Every two hours or so, when they weren’t sleeping, they sought each other out to clear their glitches once more. They tried something new each time: a finger on the edge of the console, or knuckles brushed against smooth metal. A split-second contact. Thirty seconds long. Fifteen. Each time, the glitches cleared for more or less the same duration. Each time, it held just the same novelty to them. Levi told himself he didn’t really care, that as amazing as clear vision felt to him, Erwin was the smitten one. But the lie turned weaker every time his eyesight brightened and his vision was arrested by the depths of Erwin’s eyes. 

They took turns. Levi would hesitate and grumble to himself, tell himself to  _ get it fucking over with _ , and he’d reach for Erwin’s console none too gently, lingering for a few seconds to revel in the silkiness of his golden hair, and withdraw with all the gentleness he had skipped before. Erwin, however, was deliberate in his actions: slowly, but steadily he’d place his warm hand on the side of Levi’s head, his fingers long enough to brush over the shell of an ear, the swell of a cheekbone. They stayed forcefully casual after, until the awkwardness bled away and it wasn’t forced anymore. But neither of them addressed the fact that there was nothing casual in the way Erwin leaned toward him, dipped his head as if to catch every word and rasp and tut that Levi uttered while one’s hand was on the other’s console; nothing casual at all in the way Levi stared when he could, drinking in every flash of sapphire and gold, his gaze tracing his corded arms, the swell of his chest.

He had to talk to Hange. Being the more knowledgeable of the two about these implants, they would have a better idea of what was happening. But he couldn’t help but remember their last conversation.

_ ”Watch your back, I’m telling you.” _

No, Hange wouldn’t understand. To them, Erwin was still the Mark, still the payment for comfort and a fully equipped lab. He would tell them eventually. When he had something more substantial to give them, something more than just a temporary fix and the colour of Erwin’s eyes.

The  _ ping  _ of an incoming message interrupted his brooding, and Levi read through Erwin’s proposal. No, it was a suggestion more than anything; Levi could read the man’s uncertainty between the lines. The idea raised every hair on his head.

He entered Erwin’s room without knocking, and paused. Erwin sat with his legs stretched out on the bed with yet another book in his hands, the duvet mussed, hair askew as if troubled recently, brow twisted in a frown of concentration and a cup of cooling tea on the table next to him with a spilled spot or two beside it.  _ Such a slob _ , Levi thought with an easy affection that surprised him.

He approached him. Erwin looked up, frown melting away and the brilliance of his eyes fading once more. Levi was aware of a chair not two feet away, but distance felt wrong in this moment. Slowly, watching for any sign of protest, Levi sank onto the bed at Erwin’s side. There was a hint of stress in his expression, a nervousness that Levi had already detected in his message.

“Are you sure?” Levi asked slowly.

  
  


***

The heat of his thigh radiated against Erwin's hip as the man tucked one leg beneath himself. No need for both feet on the ground. No need to keep a hand by his holster, no need to be ready for anything, anytime, anymore. And then he asks Erwin such a question and with such sincerity that Erwin could only huff a distorted, static-ridden little laugh and give him the truth and the truth was, no. He wasn't.

"It could interfere with our other implants," Erwin said. "It could kill us. It could do nothing at all. We can already partially sync with just touch. Maybe..." Erwin swallows as Levi's hand slips behind his ear, as his thumb moves idly against his cheek. "Maybe that's enough."

The static abated. Erwin found one hand resting idly on Levi's knee once it had fallen from his book.

He had been thinking about the captain. Rather, the captain intruded upon his thoughts without knocking and took up rent-free in his head. Erwin plotted his return to the Capitol and couldn't muster a single scenario that didn't involve him.

A few weeks ago, he had no idea he existed. Now, he couldn't fathom letting him go. 

It was the implants. It was all this touching. It was the screeching static which was there one moment and gone the next as soon as the captain - and it was often the captain, brusque but not unkind - touched him, wiring Erwin to associate him with relief, with peace, with the terrible beauty of all his little sounds, all his tsks and hums and sighs that were a language all their own and one Erwin suspected few but him knew or cared to know. Sounds that inspired him to wonder what others he could make, and when. What others Erwin could himself inspire.

That was as far as he allowed himself to wander. No need to make this more difficult than it will be. If they escaped with their lives, Erwin will return to the Capitol and Levi will disappear. Maybe they will try to meet and recharge, so to speak, but eventually, it will become too risky. It will become too much trouble. One day, Levi will disappear for the last time.

He will get over it. He always had. Erwin removed the captain's hand and stood to return the book to its shelf. To temper his childish heart. 

Suddenly, the wired sync felt like a step too far. 

"There is one other, maybe less effective, but less invasive option."

***

Something about Erwin felt  _ off _ , and it made Levi cross his arms over his chest, reflexive, defensive. Maybe it was because Erwin had pushed away his hand and distanced himself, maybe it was his quiet, careful voice, or maybe it was the fact that he was lingering at the bookshelf even now, his back facing Levi and his expression hidden from him. Whatever it was, it set Levi on edge like he hadn't been for days.

“What is it?” Levi asked, harsher than intended.

***

"By necessity, the first exosolar travelers lived in close quarters," Erwin said, and took a seat on the chair. Not too close. Not too far. 

"The implants were designed to accommodate that lifestyle. A few memoirs mentioned not needing to physically sync as often if the crew slept in the- in the, uh, same room."

Erwin waved off his own idea. "I understand if it's too much. Just a thought." 

  
  


***

Levi shook his head immediately. Compared to the previous suggestion, this one was nothing. “It’s fine. Makes sense.”

Levi watched Erwin process his words, the way his nervous fingers froze, the way his gaze was still locked on his feet. A spark of irritation flared up in him.  _ Fine. _

Levi stood up full of intent, his voice almost challenging Erwin. “Get your shit, then. We’re going to my room.” He felt a jolt of short-lived triumph when Erwin’s head shot up in shock. “This bed is fucking microscopic.”

***

Erwin could have laughed at the idea of him having anything of his own to bring were he not more occupied with where he was going. The captain mercifully lead the way as Erwin wiped a few beads of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He'd counted on a bit more resistance. Token resistance, even. It was as if the captain didn't mind.

He'd never seen the man's quarters, yet when he stepped inside, it couldn't have been anyone else's. He spent little time in here but to sleep from having to maintain the ship nearly on his own, so it was sparse, but not empty. It was green. Herbs and other plants lined shelves and desks and made the space look more terrestrial than a room in a hurtling ship had any right to be. 

Erwin gestured to the space beside the captain's bed. "A cot right here would work. I'll go and grab one."

***   
  


Levi stood at the doorway while Erwin familiarised himself to the room. Levi tried to look at it with an outsider’s eye, wondering how it would appear to someone not him, nervous but not showing it.

At the very least, it was clean, for Levi’s meticulous neatness manifested most in this room. The plants were all watered, so there were no drooping dead leaves to offend the eye, the bed was neatly made, the manuals were alphabetised and colour-coded, the jackets hung in a neat row, the porthole glass smudgeless. 

Erwin’s words jarred him out of his stupor.

“A cot,” Levi repeated, eyebrows raised, fists curling discreetly. When Erwin didn’t seem to understand, he said, “I thought I was clear. We’re sharing.”

Erwin’s jaw didn’t exactly drop, but his lips parted and his eyes widened - sparkling pools of bright blue…  _ fear _ ? What the fuck? Levi held in his rising annoyance with an effort. “If proximity is important, then isn’t that the most efficient method?”

***

"Efficient," Erwin echoed. "Yes, that would be efficient."

He excused himself to do a bit more reading in his own room before the lights dimmed entirely, though that was only part of it. He returned and sat on his bed with his elbows on his knees and his hands kneading at his temples. 

His body was miles away from his mind. This would be efficient, he told the sweat on his brow. If they could prolong their senses, they will have a better chance at outsmarting Rose, he begged the embers in his skin. So the captain was as witty as he was crass, as kind as he was demanding. He was pristine and athletic and short-tempered and direct. So let him be. All Erwin had to do was sleep. As soon as the sun was programmed to rise, he would rise with it and go about his day as he would any other.

He shouldn't have let his eyes linger, shouldn't have enjoyed those cuffs as much as he had, shouldn't have let himself idly desire the impossible lest it wasn't anymore.

Surely, something about him could dull his nerves. Nothing worked. He spilled blood, but so had Erwin. They might die, but to that, his blood only quickened. They might separate, but they might not. He might not want what Erwin wants.

Erwin's cheek prickled at the ghost of dozens of hard and soft and quick and slow touches. His mind helpfully unspooled reels of the captain at first looking away, then staring at his chest, then darting his eyes lazily around while never straying far from his lips. 

He might. 

The captain was asleep when Erwin returned, or else mercifully pretended to be. The sheets were cool to the touch.


	7. Chapter 7

Levi didn’t always sleep in his bed. More often than not, he’d pass out in the pilot’s seat in the bridge, surveillance footage and radar beeps melding into a lullaby of sorts that had become familiar over the years. Only on days extremely good or bad, days of maintenance that drained the energy from his very bones, only on days few and far between did he go to a bed that he made everyday, regardless of use.

Levi didn’t always sleep in his bed, but Erwin didn’t know that.

This time was not like any other. He was neither tired nor ecstatic, nor was he plagued by dying memories of the dead. This time, Levi woke up feeling unusually refreshed and warm. Woke up to perfect, static-less vision of a tousled blond head on the pillow next to him.

He had pretended to be asleep for Erwin’s sake. Even as the man’s breathing slowed and deepened, even as light snores filled the room, Levi lay awake, his blank stare boring holes onto the wall next to him, his mind churning with thoughts of what Erwin was thinking and why Erwin was thinking it, Erwin, Erwin, Erwin.

They had slept with their backs to each other. Levi woke up to Erwin’s face mere inches away from his. Felt his calves and feet trapped by his beneath the covers. Counted the bristles starting to grow on Erwin’s cheek and watched the flicker of a nightlight glint on his golden eyebrows. Even his eyelashes were gold.

Levi took in a slow, deep breath, and all he could smell was Erwin, Erwin, Erwin.

***

He heard cooling cylinders rotate in the engine room, though he shouldn't have. He heard the rhythmic chirp from the navigation array at the bridge, thought it should've been too far. Above it all was a waking heartbeat and the slow rustle of troubled sheets. 

There was music in his ear, and then a short commercial break. He even knew which frequency. He’d never caught station signals with this much clarity. This was new.

The arm slung over his side was also new. Nails passed languidly, barely there, over his back. They stiffened when Erwin stirred, grew pliant again when Erwin’s palm lay over the arm across his waist and stroked it with his thumb.

So there had been something to those hastily withdrawn glances, to his lingering, possessive touch.

He barely needed to lean forward for his lips to meet collarbone. Fingers curled into his hair. 

The commercial break was over. 

***

Levi was falling.

He had tried so hard, _ so hard_, to hold back, to grab onto something, some moral or protocol, personal code, anything_. _ Nothing worked. Nothing made sense but this.

Erwin’s hair was thick spun silk between his fingers, not a new feeling thanks to their experiments, but not like this, never like _ this. _ Every little caress of Erwin's lips on his skin felt like a brand on his heart, jolting it into overdrive, expelling the air from his lungs with a shudder. His fingers moved of their own accord, unhurried but purposeful, bringing themselves closer, _ closer_.

It was never like this. It had never been like this. Levi had never let himself fall, never even stumbled over the edge, never craved so little and so much, always closed up, never been so close.

Closer.

He tugged gently on Erwin’s hair, mindful of his restful state, and Erwin dipped his head up easily, closer, like he didn't even have to think about it. Their noses touched and their breaths mingled. His eyes were closed and his eyelashes sparkled gold.

Closer.

When Levi's lips finally met Erwin’s, it felt like something had finally fallen into place.

***

Erwin's hands shot to Levi's wrists and pinned his hands above his head. The man strained and kicked only as long as it took Erwin to mouth at the shell of his ear.

"That wasn't part of the plan," he whispered, and let him go. He'd barely loosened his grip before the captain tore his hands away and pinned Erwin to the bed in turn with both hands firm on his throat. 

In the pantheon of all the stupid things he'd ever done, this one was well up there, but he was rewarded when Levi watched him lie newly pliant and understand with an indignant huff that Erwin had wanted him there all along, wanted him imposing and breathless and blocking out the rest of the world for a little while longer.

Erwin sighed as Levi's hands left his throat and wrapped instead around his yielding wrists. His hair fell in his eyes. His legs were tangled in the sheets. He licked his lips.

"You’ve made a mess of me."

***

His eyes were so _ blue_. Never, in all their experimenting, had Levi’s eyesight reached this kind of luminosity. Every colour was heightened, everything glowed. But nothing came close to the way those eyes shimmered: heat and want and something quite else gleaming from each striation of blue and grey and pale, pale violet. He was breathtaking, and he lay there beneath him breathless, lay there for him.

Levi’s heart raced. He felt a grin grow on his lips.

“I bet-” he rasped, and leaned in, his thighs tightening their grip on Erwin’s hips, drinking in the way his full lips parted on a gasp, “-you could be messier if you tried-”, he dragged his mouth over the sharp edge of his jaw, nipped at it, “-old man.”

Erwin squirmed, looked like he was about to say something - some shitty witticism, no doubt, and Levi was having none of it. He claimed Erwin’s lips once more, hotter, stronger, _ closer _ this time. He tightened his grip on Erwin’s wrists when he kissed back, and swallowed another gasp. Levi leaned back with a satisfying smack of their lips, humming, contemplative.

His smile widened.

“You really do like that, huh.” He bent down with another slow roll of his hips, reveling in yet another soft moan. “Maybe I really should bring out the handcuffs.”

***

Erwin groaned. "What's stopping you?" 

He freed one hand to pull him back down by his neck and bruise their lips a while longer. Time crawled. Nothing existed but the heat of him on his hips, in his hands, in his mouth. 

With his mouth occupied and his mind elsewhere, Levi did not notice Erwin's free hand slipping between them and into the loose pants he'd worn to bed, pants riding ever lower over his hips as he broke away and stifled a moan in Erwin's neck.

Erwin expected him to recover much faster than he had. By the time Levi came back to himself, he fell to muffle another tortured sound once Erwin slipped inside and stroked him properly. It had been long for him, too. He gasped when Erwin took them both in hand and bit the join of his neck and shoulder hard when he came. Erwin followed with his face in his damp hair and his name on his bitten lips. 

***

Levi came down from the high slowly, his head spinning, chest heaving. He could feel the mess between them, but he didn’t mind. Just a little while longer. Just a little more of Erwin’s warm hand on his thigh, his shuddering breath in his hair.

When Erwin seemed to have caught his breath, Levi raised himself up from his neck with a final nuzzle and met his eye. Erwin looked absolutely gorgeous fucked out: pupils blown, lips bitten red, skin gleaming with sweat. They stared at each other for a long moment.

They reached for each other together, and this time their kisses were slow and languorous. Levi melted, focused solely on Erwin’s terrifyingly gentle hands on his arms, his back, on the way Erwin lapped up his sighs.

“Was this,” Levi murmured unthinkingly against Erwin's lips, “part of the plan?”

***

Erwin hadn't planned on the captain's demanding mouth, his muscular thighs. The satisfying weight of him in his arms. The certainty that this would not happen again and, maybe, should not have happened at all. 

"No," Erwin said. "Not this."

The captain, too perceptive for his own good, rolled off and waited for more with a knowing frown. Erwin couldn't remember the last person who stared straight through him like this. Mike, surely, but they first met in diapers and Mike's profession depended on reading Erwin and everyone around him. 

He shouldn't be surprised. This was how Levi fared so well with his clients despite, Erwin suspected, not a lick of formal training. What little he hears and sees, he commits to memory and analyzes and course corrects again and again and again until his skill could best any of Erwin's Capitol rivals, could best Erwin himself.

The frequency in his head was playing last decade's Kossian pop. Erwin's mouth quirked up at the odd beat in his head as he brought Levi's palm to his lips and parted from him to dress. 

Once Levi completed a routine system's check, Erwin joined him on the bridge with a record of their sensory exploits. One touch gave them an hour and fifteen while another gave two and a half. Their night together had given them five and counting, with Erwin's radio-sensitivity beginning to wane.

"It's proximity after all," Erwin said, schooling himself into some picture of normality. "If this dose lasts a full twenty-four hours, we won’t need to bother with the sync."

***

Something was _ off _with Erwin. He had seen it in the way Erwin had closed himself up, gentle yet withdrawn. Levi grit his teeth in front of the dashboard, deliberating over giving him the silent treatment, but the traces of his touch were too recent on his skin. Levi turned slowly, and Erwin’s look of forced calm had the words tumbling out of his mouth.

“What are you doing here, then? Got your glitch sorted, didn’t you?”

Erwin was startled, yet understanding. He knew exactly what Levi was thinking, the bastard.

Levi bit back more venomous words with tremendous effort. “What’s eating you?”

***

No, Erwin thought, he wouldn't last a day in the Capitol. For all his perception, he had no patience for subtlety.

"I believe what you told me," Erwin said, because maybe the captain needed to hear it. "That you were trying to do something for those people. I lied and stole my way to the top too, just to stand there alone and rudderless. To realize there's no point to any of it if you're not lifting up everyone else. You didn't need to agree to help me expose Rose. To risk your freedom, your life. You did."

Erwin gave him a look he prayed looked as sincere as he felt. Here's the truth, if he so sorely wants it. "Would you believe I'm just nervous? Trying to remember the last time I smelled rain? Or what it was I last said to friends and family before you abducted me?" 

***

Levi didn’t know what to do with Erwin’s words. He had received his share of praise, of awe sometimes, even adoration from Isabel, but Erwin’s frank approval had him at a loss. He felt warmth grow in the pit of his stomach and bubble up in his chest, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

And then there was that ugly word, the one he thought they had moved past. _ Abduction _. No matter what Erwin said, Levi hated that he had come so close to ruining everything, for everyone. Hated the fear that Erwin let him see in his eyes, fear that in some part was caused by Levi’s actions. He didn’t know what to do.

Levi’s mind churned. Then, he remembered.

“Your friend, the security chief. Give me his contact.” It would be child’s play for him, placing a secure call in an encrypted channel that no passing radar or receiver could intercept. He had done it countless times with Hange.

Yet again, Erwin was surprised, but Levi insisted. 

***

Erwin sensed it was pointless to suggest how sophisticated Capitol - and, more pertinently, Mike's - tracking equipment was, yet not a moment after he gave the man Mike's personal number, there was the man himself on the screen before them.

“Identify yours-” Mike's jaw dropped.

No. He shouldn't be able to see them. Erwin's eyes shot to the camera sensor on the dashboard. It was on. He watched the captain in his periphery, no censor or barrier of any kind, give Mike a parody of a salute with his face on full display before stepping away, ostensibly to give them privacy.

Mike, too, visibly struggled to parse what he'd just seen. His hands rose and flew into a flurry of questions.

"No need, Mike," Erwin said with a flood of fondness. "I can hear you." 

"How-" He shook his head and spoke while continuing to sign, torn between hope and disbelief. "Later. Are you safe? Where are you? Who was that? How-"

"Yes, three days to The Port, the captain, a miracle, in that order. A few things may have happened in between."

Mike scoffed incredulously. He looked exhausted. He looked thin. He looked like he'd just seen his friend raised from the dead. "Oh no,” he huffed sarcastically. “Do take your time."

Erwin left the bridge with eyes shining and ears ringing from having relived every moment from his last memory of the Capitol to just a moment ago - barring a few details Mike didn't strictly need to know. 

He found Levi polishing an already pristine display case of pinned electromagnetivorous insects and pulled him into his arms.

"That was stupid. That was monstrously stupid," Erwin said into his hair. "I had to convince him that you rescued me, stole the real perpetrator's ship, and that we just happen to be compatible and the stars know if he bought it." He kissed his temple, his forehead, his eyes, his nose. "Thank you." His arms tightened around him. "Thank you."

***

The soft joy in Erwin’s voice made Levi’s chest swell again and brought a small smile to his lips. He latched his hands onto Erwin’s back, holding him just as tightly, huffing a chuckle when Erwin’s lips wouldn’t leave his face, murmuring words of gratitude.

He reached up and caught Erwin’s face, looked over each feature slowly, cataloguing, admiring yet again. Erwin’s eyes were wet and lips still curved into a smile, and Levi felt a sharp twinge in his chest when he realised how much he’d come to care for this man.

“It was nothing,” Levi insisted, hoping Erwin understood. “_ Nothing _.”

Erwin did understand. He leaned forward until their foreheads touched, their soft sighs mingling.

***

Their eyes and ears remained unburdened by the lifelong wraiths of glaring, whining static for the full twenty-four hours. It could have been more, though Erwin wasn't about to convince the captain to keep apart to confirm it, and he doubted Levi would have let him finish the thought before shoving him to the mattress. Their words and touches and shared sighs grew desperate as the hour of their arrival at the Port drew closer. 

The station city came into view. It was a mote of dust. In an hour, a black pearl. In another, a colossus. Erwin's hands worried at a coil of insulated wire in his lap. He'd taken to watching the station, with all its thousands of substations and several billion inhabitants hailing from every corner of the known universe, engulf them from the copilot's chair. He heard all their broadcasts and podcasts and livestreams. It took some practice, but he had learned how to cycle through them, how to focus on one in particular, how to tune them out entirely when he wished. The old tech, he recalled, was yet attuned to muscle movements, and all it took to switch from a ball game to a transgalactic debate night was a quirk at his mouth, and to stifle it all, a pinch at his brow. Something that had mystified and dogged him for all his life was becoming as natural as breathing.

The captain joined him to rattle off his license and canned purpose of stay to a stationmaster.

He felt eyes on him. On the wire. 

Wordlessly, he offered one end. 

*

In two hours, he is handed to men who throw a black bag over his head, bind his hands behind his back, and shove him in the back of a moving van.

In two and a half, the van stops. There is a scuffle and gunfire among them, and a friendly voice tells him he is almost safe. 

In three hours, he is unbound. He removes the bag from his head and raises it to a gleaming, palatial penthouse. A quarter of the station could be seen from its spotless, floor to ceiling windows. A gentle breeze cools his skin, having boiled in the sweltering van. A man Erwin recognizes is shaking his hand and marveling at what a miracle it was that they detected his implant signature coming from that van.

In three hours, Erwin warns the president of Rose Corp that a man is coming their way.


	8. Chapter 8

Levi had forgotten how overwhelming Hange could be. They gasped and shrieked and gestured and wailed. _ “You let him go?” _ was thrown at him with rising incredulity, even as Levi spoke less and less, clamming up in the face of their exuberance.

Eventually he reached breaking point and left them, annoyed, abrupt. He rechecked his holsters, his cartridges, and set off running. Levi loved running.

He barreled through the District Market, a veteran at zipping through crowds unseen and leaping over obstacles in the streets without breaking stride. This time was no different, except…

Except for his vision.

This time, he could see straight to the end of lit and dark alleys alike. This time, he could tell the ripe fruits from the overripe in stalls two streets off, he could see the haze of running motors in the garages, the panoramic simul-view of a canyon in the viewfinder of a random child’s camera. He accidentally jostled a heavyset woman, and when she turned to berate him, Levi clumsily transmitted the simulated canyon onto her retina.

It was madness. It was exhilarating. 

He used the surrounding buildings and scaffolding and his own nimble hands and feet to scale a broadcast tower on the edge of the District. There he perched, his muscles buzzing with energy, and he thoroughly examined his updated visual implants - now receptive to any and every pixel for miles around. He found that a simple twitch of his right cheek allowed him to switch between feeds as though he was flipping through channels on a personal cable connection.

He continued to test his implants. He was ready when the old fashioned clock in the district began to toll. He glanced at its digital face, though he didn’t have to anymore.

It was time.

  
  


***

  
  


The president chuckled. "We're safe here, I assure you. You've had a long..."

"Five weeks, three days," Erwin finished for him.

City lights glinted on the man's grey beard and sharp little lapel pin shaped for his company's namesake. He motioned to a sofa and sat across as an assistant poured amber into a pair of glasses. He offered to sign to Erwin as the president spoke, to which Erwin politely declined.

"You're sure?" The president asked pityingly. "We won't tell, mister Smith."

Erwin smiled. "I'll make do."

He shrugged. "I must say," the president started, "when we began investigating the Port's various little - I hesitate to call their crime in any way organized - we imagined we'd find our stolen merchandise or the men vandalizing our properties, but this is..."

"Quite the prize."

"Isn't it? I can't imagine what petty Port mobs would want with you."

Erwin's drink swirled in his glass as the president adjusted his suit jacket and leaned forward with an air approaching sincerity.

"Whatever our past, rather public, disagreements," the president said, "My men and I are relieved to see you alive and well, as I'm sure everyone else from here to the Capitol would be. We've already notified Capitol ambassadors on the station and they'll be here to recover you, I'm told, in a few hours."

In the spaces between the president's words, Erwin caught station broadcasts in bars, in homes, and in station squares. Anchors from half a dozen networks regaled how brave Rose investigators cunningly tracked down and liberated the thought-dead senior diplomat in the world's first successful Capitol abduction. As they spoke, senators and fellow diplomats were being tracked down to comment on how relieved they were. How thankful they were.

"I'm reminded," the president said, "of your words, once, to Capitol Parliament. Something to the effect of Rose never giving a thing without expecting something in return. We couldn't convince you then, but I hope this little incident can be exhibit A. We'd be obliged if all we received, as anyone would, was your gratitude."

"You certainly have it," Erwin said, "provided you take my advice about my former captor a little more seriously."

The president leaned back easily. Voices in his internal earpiece informed him that they were still searching.

"We have him," the president said to Erwin.

"Excellent. Even so," Erwin said, glancing at the windows and letting his hands tremble just a touch, "I'd feel more comfortable waiting for my entourage in a less vulnerable area."

"I assure you, nowhere is..."

Static filled the president's ears.

"...safer. This tower, this entire district, is patrolled by-"

The static became a cloying electronic screech. It was no longer merely in their ears. The windows began to rattle. The president's security detail, having been posted beside the doors, approached them and immediately began to escort the two out of the room.

The president scoffed as the static weakened with each step. "Probably some slacking malcontents at the power station." In his ear, his contact began rattling off their pet bounty hunter's last known location and promising a redoubled search effort.

  
  


***

Levi knew the Tower well, knew its ins and outs, its stairways and corridors, each staggering shift of the security detail. It had been well over a decade since he had worked for them, and yet, as he zoomed into the monolith with his updated implants from a distance, it looked like not much had changed. The locks were upgraded, the security detail was larger, the paint job was new. But the skeleton remained the same.

_ There is nothing new under the sun. _

They were looking for him. He watched the goons patrol the streets, question passersby, check security feeds. They wouldn’t find him. Every security camera he passed began to loop. He reached a multi-tiered garage three blocks away unaccosted, and perched on top of it to watch the tower’s service entrance. Anytime, now. 

A surge of static rose in his ears, and Levi saw how all the people far below him responded with annoyance in waves, saw the gleaming glass of the tower tremble.

_ Now _.

Levi took a flying leap off the garage and parkoured his way down, landing silently behind the nearest disoriented guard. Then, pausing for a split second to short the man’s visual implants, Levi snuck past.

  
  


***

Security brought them through several winding halls in the massive building, down a few flights of stairs, and into an interior room without windows.

"It seems you have what you wanted after all, mister Smith," the president said with a good-natured laugh, and excused himself.

He left the sitting room and entered another whose walls were unmistakably soundproofed. Even so, Erwin overheard the man's colorful vocabulary with great clarity as he demanded to know the cause of the disturbance and reminded his employees how much trouble they had all gone to in order to acquire the asset in exactly the way the way they had. He praised them for their camerawork and prompt delivery to station news networks before ending the call.

The president returned and ordered a guard with a pointed snap to whip up another pair of drinks.

"I'm afraid, mister president, this room is hardly more secure than the last," Erwin said.

The president waited a beat to press the annoyance out of his face before strolling with as much leisure as he could summon to the door to give it a hearty knock.

"Five inches of solid steel under this faux-wood paint job, mister Smith."

"I'm certain it is," said Erwin. "And that's an outdated series 12 Hartman lock."

The president frowned.

Erwin turned to the member of their security who had lit up in recognition. "You must understand, this man cracked Capitol security," Erwin said to him. "I don't have access to the datanet, but I'd guess their equipment is a touch more modern."

The security team's apparent locksmith darted his eyes around his retinal HUD as he searched. "He’s right," he confirmed. He turned to his superiors, who eyed one another and then the president.

"Sir-" started one.

One of the officers drew her gun. The president stepped back. Erwin stood. 

"Lieutenant," warned the captain, his own drawn on her, his eyes darting from his subordinate to the perfectly empty space she aimed at.

"You don't see him?" she asked incredulously. "None of you?"

Suddenly, another officer drew on yet another empty stretch of wall, and then a third. Finally, the president startled away from yet another perfectly ordinary part of the room.

"Are we all seeing a projection of a short, masked man with dark hair?" said one. One by one, the others confirmed. The president gasped, and they lowered their weapons.

"He's gone." 

The captain called in reinforcements and ushered them all out once again. The president did not move.

"It's him," he said under his breath. The captain returned to escort him personally. 

  
  


***

Levi’s heart raced. He was being hypervigilant, checking and double checking and losing time, certain that the mission was going too well. He had always been quick to learn and adapt, and he used his enhanced eyes like he had been doing it for years. His fingers itched to draw out his blades. His hand missed the weight of his gun. Muscle memory he would need to unlearn. No more innocent blood. 

He entered through a service corridor, accessed the security feed and projected it to the stationed guards. He slipped past them as they blindly knocked into each other. He experimented on the stairs, streaming a live ball game to a man who then nearly toppled down the steps, an advertisement for a masculine enhancement drug that made a woman drop all her files with its abruptness, a plane of darkness to a well-dressed thug who walked into a wall on a landing and stayed there, confused. All this could be done as little more than an afterthought, a simple twitch here, a nudge there. No one noticed him creep up the stairs. No one will know his face, his steps. It will be as if he had never existed here.

When he approached their floor, he blinked and saw infrared. He found their first safe-room taking up almost half the area of a floor marked “under construction”. The closer Levi came, the more he could distinguish between the people huddled inside. His gaze lingered on the glowing form that was clearly Erwin, and paused. He watched the figures move, watched the way Erwin’s silhouette leaned casually against the cold surface of a table. Noted how his body temperature was more or less normal. Curious. Not stressed at all.

One of the figures in the room swerved in a panic, gun primed. Just one person. Levi had meant to tinker with all their eyes, but he was distracted, like some rookie _ idiot _. He grit his teeth, forced himself to look away from Erwin; forced himself to think of anything other than the easy smiles he had once given Levi and was now giving the Rose pigs.

Levi gave himself a mental shake before moving on.

It wasn’t exactly as planned, but Levi had always been quick on his feet, so he targeted them one by one instead. Then he watched, just a corridor away, as they all left the safe-room and descended further into the building, possibly to the sub-basement. He tracked them through the security cam feeds until there were none left, feeling yet another jolt when he saw Erwin flash more pleasant smiles at his captors. 

His goddamned _ smiles _. Levi took a deep breath and thought of Erwin’s sighs instead, his hisses of frustration, the way he had stared each time Levi had bared himself to him a little more. He’d had no mask of a smile back then, Levi reminded himself. That was real. This wasn’t real.

The last door under video surveillance beeped closed behind them, and Levi stood.

***

The security team, now ten strong with officers joining from other floors, lead them underground. Retinas were scanned. Weapon registrations checked. Bodies searched. Non-essential implant functions deactivated. Only the captain joined them inside. 

The room lay beyond half a dozen physical barriers and nearly as many of the invisible variety. Erwin took a seat in one of several armchairs across from a large, paper-strewn desk and stretched his whining legs. 

"You'd think I'd appreciate so much exercise after being cooped up for so long."

The president was in too fevered a discussion with his guard captain to pay him any mind. Erwin sighed and listened deeply, listened beyond words, beyond sentient language. He listened for the language of tremors and hums and groans. The sound of his hosts' deliberating scattered chaotically across the room. Some walls responded differently than others. Thinner. Thicker. He was in the right place. 

Erwin turned his head a touch and the captain stumbled, as if something were terribly wrong with his inner ear.

"What's the matter with you?" The president pressed. The captain righted himself and apologized, only to stumble entirely to his feet and clutch his head.

"Mister president- I can't seem to-" The captain paled and held his middle as he wisely abandoned trying to rise.

Erwin stood and hauled the nauseous, fading captain to an armchair. The president watched him. His demeanor darkened. 

"You've been taking this sequence of events curiously well, Mister Smith."

Erwin browsed a bookcase. "I've traveled with your hired gun for weeks. This isn't half of what he's capable of."

The president grunted skeptically and used a panel next to the door to inform the team outside to carry the captain out and send another man in.

"So it's true," Erwin went on. "He is your man."

The president's eyes widened minutely, having neglected to protest this particular detail. Maybe in less terse circumstances, he may have. He shrugged it off and paced beside his desk. "_ Was _, mister Smith, if you insist we say the quiet parts out loud. Nothing personal, you understand. A bit of theater. He, our leading man."

"Paying off Capitol security, abduction and staged rescue just to drum up public sympathy, swing a few last senators," Erwin said. "I'm almost impressed. What did you promise your leading man?" 

"Oh, we only promised his heart and kidneys to a few friends of the company for a job well done, but it appears he's making us work for them." 

"Why not the eyes?"

The president scoffed and took a seat behind the desk in his grand leather chair. "How pedestrian, mister Smith. You can get those for a dime in the lower districts."

“Maybe.” Erwin strode between the president and a thin panel of wall the echoes had suggested was a hidden door. "Not like his."


	9. Chapter 9

This was going to be the trickiest part. Levi had to wait, scan ahead for all the surveillance feeds, and loop them back before he could go a step further. His head pounded from what he suspected was the strain of redirecting trillions of pixels back and forth. His head felt hot and his eyes swam. He couldn’t do this for much longer. 

He followed the route they had taken until a certain level, then branched off into the service stairwells where there were fewer video feeds but denser foot traffic. It was risky, but Levi would deal with humans and their imperfect impulses any day over automated death traps. He slung glitches and simulations into their eyes and, when his headache began to spike, projected simple ad popups that gave him plenty of time to slink past.

His hearing crackled.

_ “... cooped up for so long.”  _

Erwin’s voice.

Levi stumbled, a guard saw him, began to raise his gun. Levi shorted his eyes and ran past him. Shit,  _ shit _ . He blackened the eyes of every guard he met next. He paused only at the end of his planned route, breathing carefully, hands on his knees. He needed to fix this.

The eyes of all the guards behind him went dark simultaneously, then turned back on. And again. Levi waited anxiously, hijacking another man’s feed. He watched them react, then reason. ‘Something was up with the power grid.’ ‘Maybe someone was using a scrambler.’ 

With a soundless sigh of relief, Levi switched away from the man’s vision and switched on his own HUD, reconnected to the call he had put on hold, and was greeted by Hange’s beaming face.

<<All good?>> They signed.

Levi gave them a thumbs up. <<You?>>

<<All channels are good to go>>

Levi nodded and switched off his HUD. He strode to the door in front of him, inspecting the locks, barely registering the words he heard beyond it.

_ “...the eyes?” _ Levi thought absently of the gleam in Erwin’s blue, blue eyes as he had explained the locks. A Silverton. A Yale here. One of the new SafeSecure electric ones. What a chore.

_ “Not like his _ ,” he heard Erwin say.

No, Levi mused, working on the locks like he had been taught, remembering lake blue. Not like his.

  
  


***

  
  


The locks at the front door began to disengage, and when it opened, the captain - his captain - stepped inside and shut it behind him.

The president shot out of his chair, made for the hidden door, and stopped abruptly when he understood that Erwin stood between him and escape.

He laughed, as if at a practical joke. "Now, gentlemen-"

Erwin motioned to another stretch of hollow wall. Levi approached it, felt along its seams, and ripped out the false wood to reveal the safe beyond it. 

The president reached for a desk drawer. Levi turned. As his hand closed over the handle, he shouted and dropped to the floor with his hands clawing at his eyes. Levi kept his own trained on him, suddenly panting with exertion, as Erwin picked the lock and found a copy of the dud contract Levi had been offered, along with scores of more interesting documents.

"They'll never believe you," the president spat, sitting up and shouting and looking wildly around with red, streaming eyes. "All they'll see is an ingrate politician biting the hand that rescued him-"

Erwin flooded the man's ears with a live news broadcast airing recently acquired audio. 

_ -Paying off Capitol security, abduction and staged rescue just to drum up public sympathy, swing a few last senators- _

_ -Nothing personal, you understand. A bit of theater-  _

_ -Oh, we only promised his liver and kidneys to a few friends of the company for a job well done-  _

Levi glared. The president was silent for several long moments. He sighed.

"I never doubted you, Smith," he said ruefully. He struggled to his feet, feeling his way around the desk and moving where he assumed Erwin still stood. "What do you want, then? You're not the type for hard cash or fast ships. Let's do that private-public partnership you always wanted. Capitol and Rose, side by side. Best of both worlds. Pushing out those vultures at Sina and Maria for good measure." 

Erwin wished the man could see his face, though he knew he wasn't capable of understanding the expression on it.

"All these years, all my department's endless compromises, all the interstellar cries of displaced people-”

"I assure you," the president babbled, stumbling backward into his chair, "this partnership could-"

"Even now, you speak without listening."

"We can-" The president stopped as his ears began to fill with static. 

"You certainly did in Sol. Drove my father and I and several million others from our homes before deciding Earth wasn't enough. All those hearings. All the protests. Makes one wonder why you need ears at all." 

Erwin watched him shudder and cry out as the static spiked once and disappeared. They left him squinting with unseeing eyes and straining with unhearing ears.

  
  


***

They slunk out of the tower like ghosts. Levi’s heart was still pounding, a rhythm that his aching head matched perfectly. He felt wrung dry, exhausted. Yet his every nerve was on high alert, aware of every breath he heard Erwin take next to him as they ran. It was done. He was free. They were free. 

Levi eyed the documents that Erwin had brought away with him, the way he clutched them to his chest. He thought of the look on Erwin’s face when he had spoken to Mike on the ship.

Levi’s chest tightened.

They had emerged onto one of the market streets without him noticing and now that they had mingled in a crowd, Levi slowed down. As he did so, he made up his mind, strengthened his resolve. He  _ had _ to ask. “Where will you…” He paused. “Erwin?”

Erwin had stopped. He stood staring at a stall selling Kressan dumplings, of all things. Gentle Kressan folk music played from the old transistor next to the wizened shopkeeper.

Levi took a hesitant step forward. “Erwin?” He repeated.

  
  


***

  
  


Erwin had to think of anything else, anything in the world. 

He had to know if they were the northern type or the spicier, almost-unfit-for-human-consumption sort the west continental Kressan preferred. The shopkeep had come with their mother, he learned, hard at work with the dough in the back, and her daughters, all two dozen of whom were studying at SouthPort aviation academy while one or two malcontents terrorized the alleyways, all sleeveless human tanks and restored motorbikes. He took his deserved ribbing for humanity's poor influence on her youngest and bought out half her display for her trouble. His heart yet raced, his head lashed by migraines. 

They darted from one shop or stall to another, or rather, Erwin did with Levi at his heels, assuring him all the while that he kept a well-tuned ear fixed for any all points bulletin for anyone like them. When reports of the incident began to trickle in from nearby auto radios, Erwin tore himself from the meats and pastries and flowers and artwork and wove through the lower levels to their rendezvous with Levi's associate. They passed teeming plazas and flowering gardens, grimy alleys and towering financial districts. Would that his father could have seen this.

"We'll need to work out of the ship until the immediate shock blows over," Erwin said breathlessly as they took a sharp turn past a street of shuttered, foreclosed homes. He tapped the documents before tucking them back into his coat. "More ways to leverage this than we can imagine. We can convince local assemblies, unions, congregations with this, drip feed Rose's rival corps and let them fight and tire themselves out of this place." 

He glanced back, and though Levi nodded along, his mind was elsewhere. The dumpling Erwin had tossed him minutes ago was still in his hand, forgotten.

They cut through a local park with spiraling, iridescent flora. 

"What do you think?" 

  
  


***

  
  


_ I think you keep saying ‘we’ a lot _ . Levi became even more anxious, his heartbeat fluttery. Erwin seemed to have answered the question pounding in his head, but he couldn’t be sure.

“How,” Levi licked his dry lips, “how long do you think that will take?”

  
  
  


***

Erwin chanced a look at him as they cut through the trees. There will always be another president. Another Rose. 

"It could be a year. It could be the rest of our lives."

****

Ever the diplomat, the bastard. He grabbed Erwin’s wrist and they stopped abruptly in the midst of the thicket, in the flash of an artificial sunset.

“So.” Levi said, twining his fingers through Erwin’s larger ones. “Which one is it?” His chest swelled when Erwin grinned back. 

They knew which one.

  
  


*

“So when will I see you again?” Hange half-wailed, half-whined.

“Not soon,” Levi said frankly, scrubbing hard at a soup stain on his precious dashboard. God _ damn _ Hange.

“You won’t miss me at all, will you.” Some minute edge in those words made Levi pause and turn around. Hange was mad irritating, but--

“I will.” Levi muttered. “You know I will, Z.”

Hange’s exaggerated frown melted away. “Yeah.” They sighed, then grinned. “Although, I bet Mr. Hot-shot Ex-Diplomat will keep you  _ plenty _ preoccupied.”

“Shut up,” Levi snapped, instantly turning back to his biohazard of a dashboard.

“Seriously, it’s like the man was custom-built for you, dreamy eyes and all. Are you sure he’s not a droid--”

“He’s not--”

“Ooh,  _ checked _ him, have you? Those pecs sure look damn real--”

Hange had to run from the ship without another word, mops flying in their wake.

  
  


***

That afternoon, Mike arrived via an emergency warp-10 lane and met Erwin in the animated throng of a nearby theater district. Erwin groaned as his friend found and embraced him to within an inch of his life. 

Mike pulled him along at a fast clip through the neon-washed lines of theatergoers. "If we leave now, we can-"

"Mike-"

"-get back to the Capitol in time to-"

Erwin stopped him. Rather, Mike stopped when an old song began to play in his head. Some grating last-century pop they'd play at one another as roommates when one of them forgot to wash the dog or get the groceries. 

Mike slowly turned around. "How?"

*

"He was less than ecstatic," Erwin relayed as Levi undocked from the port in between wiping up dashboard food stains left by a friend he'd tasked with keeping it safe. "But he'll understand."

Erwin fell into the copilot’s chair and thumbed through the documents they recovered from the safe. There were enough names and dealings in here to make Rose miserable to its last day. Not a single scanner had detected anything amiss, because there had been nothing to detect. Simply old, supposedly defective implants getting along with the new, and with one another. Just a junk dealer and retired diplomat. Even that much will be scrubbed soon enough. 

Levi shut his tired eyes once they cleared Port space. Erwin had lowered his own auditory input once his own migraine became unbearable. Maybe slipping through one of the most secure towers on the station was a little much for the first day of the rest of their lives. 

Erwin smoothed a hand through Levi's hair. Levi turned to him and with slow but certain movements, asked with his hands:

_ Where to? _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
